The playwright who prefers films

Martin McDonagh took the theatre world by storm in 1996 following the premiere of his debut play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, in Galway.

The production was the first part of The Leenane Trilogy, a set of plays that also included A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. All three were staged by Druid Theatre Company and directed by Garry Hynes. Within a couple of years the shows were playing on Broadway to thunderous acclaim.

It was a stunning rise to fame for McDonagh, only 26 when The Beauty Queen debuted. What was also remarkable was that such laser-sharp and savage parodies of small-town Connemara had been written by an Englishman. The son of Irish emigrants to London, McDonagh was born and raised there, but he and his brother John spent the summers of their childhood in his father’s home village of Lettermullan in Connemara. After finishing school, he turned his hand to writing stories and plays, inspired by the cinema that had always fascinated him, and the plays he was familiar with, chiefly the work of Harold Pinter and David Mamet.

It was the idiom and the iconography peculiar to his father’s homeland of Connemara, however, that provided the seed for McDonagh’s breakthrough plays. The plays in The Leenane Trilogy, as well as his later works The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and The Pillowman, were all conceived and written inside of a year when McDonagh was still only 24.

Despite the acclaim meted out to him, McDonagh’s depiction of Ireland also drew critics, alert to what they regard as a sham ‘Irishry’ the Londoner plays upon. Yet, McDonagh has always been wily enough to turn his representations of Irishness back in on themselves. What is often the most troubling thing about his character’s grotesque attributes is how close to the bone they come. Moreover, beneath the ‘Irishness’ of his plays, it is McDonagh’s storytelling and the precise mechanics of his plotting that have distinguished him as a playwright.

Despite the odd sensational press story — famously, he told Sean Connery to ‘fuck off’ at an awards event in the mid 1990s — the writer has always shunned attention.

Notably, in the last decade McDonagh has had only one new play produced — 2010’s A Behanding in Spokane, which received mixed reviews. McDonagh, meanwhile, was focusing his energies on cinema, his preferred medium. In 2006, his short film Six-Shooter won an Oscar. The film starred Brendan Gleeson and, in keeping with his plays, it was doused in a strange mix of lyrical morbidity and manic quasi-cartoon violence. His debut feature film, 2008’s In Bruges, pairing Gleeson with Colin Farrell, was again graced with those trademark elements but underneath its playfulness, it was also a more circumspect film, with a strange melancholy at its heart. Unfortunately, McDonagh’s follow-up, last year’s Seven Psychopaths, while entertaining, was less accomplished.

In 2011, McDonagh’s older brother, John Michael, made his own impressive film debut with hit movie The Guard. (His latest film Calvary is released later this year.) Martin McDonagh, meanwhile, has gone quiet again.