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The Beauty Queen of Leenane
by Martin McDonaghThe Play |
& |
The Author |
Martin McDonagh was born in 1970 in South London, his mother stemming from Sligo, and his father hailing from Galway (where the so-called 'Leenane Trilogy' is set).
His first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, hit the London West End Stages in early 1996, and became an immediate success. He was awarded the 1996 Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, the 1996 Writers' Guild Award for Best Fringe Theatre Play, and the 1996 George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright.
McDonagh also gained some doubtful fame with the tabloid newspapers back in 1996 at the Evening Standard Awards, when almost starting a fight with Sean Connery (who complained about McDonagh's drunken and noisy behaviour during the ceremony).
The Beauty Queen of Leenane was followed by the other two parts of the 'Leenane Trilogy', A Skull in Connemara (1997) and The Lonesome West (1997; performed by the Anglo-Irish Theatre Group in January 2000).
His other work includes The Cripple of Inishman
(1997) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2000) (his most recent play), which is currently showing at the London West End as well as at the Burgtheater Vienna.
Synge The Same Old Tunes?
On the 26th of January, 1907, a play saw its first performance in Dublin that transformed Irish drama: On that night, John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World created a scandal that was not immediately foreseeable on the basis of its setting in the west of Ireland:
Country public-house or shebeen, very rough and untidy. There is a sort of counter on the right [...] At the left there is a large open fireplace, with turf fire, an d a small door into inner room.
A rural setting, away from the Dublin drawing rooms, just like this one:
The living-room/kitchen of a rural cottage in the west of Ireland. Front door stage left, a long black range along the back wall with a box of turf beside it and a rocking-chair on its right.
That is Martin McDonagh's opening stage direction for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, written almost 90 years later, in 1996. His plays, all of them, owe a great debt to Synge - a debt that sometimes shades off into pastiche and which McDonagh is at pains to deny. Yet the evidence is there, and it is solid: No major Irish playwright since Synge concentrated on the rural west so exclusively and obsessively, no-one was so bent upon exposing the layers of desperate violence just below the innocent-looking surface. In Synge's time it was the search for an archetypical Irishness that was used to emphasize early 20th century efforts at nation-building and against the presence of the English; in our time it is the search for a lost European rural innocence that attracts tourists. The same people who would rightly refuse even to listen to what passes as Volksmusik in Germany will happily sing along to the same repackaged inanities if they are classified as Irish folk (no disrespect to real folk music; there is little enough around.) McDonagh, like Synge before him, demolishes such nostalgias: In his Ireland, people have long memories, and they don't use them to retain songs and jokes:
Of course it's beautiful here, a fool can see. The mountains and the green, and people speak. But when everybody knows everybody else's business ... I don't know. (Pause.) You can't kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge twenty year.But there is another debt McDonagh owes to Synge: His characters don't just live in the west, and they don't just expose its deadly backwardness through their actions, they also talk like their literary predecessors, even if the subjects are ever so slightly more offbeat. Here Mick is at work clearing graves in A Skull in Connemara:
MICK: If you'll not be liking my skull-battering ways you can be off with you.
MAIRTIN: Your ways is fine indeed.
MICK: I do have a dustpan and brush.
MAIRTIN: I was thinking. Goodbye Biddy Curran or whatever it is your name is
You're all mixed up now anyways, you poor feck you.
MICK: Don't be cursing now, Mairtin.
MAIRTIN: I won't be.
MICK: Not when you're handling the departed, now.
MAIRTIN: This is more fun than hamster-cooking!
The only thing that McDonagh definitely cannot create anymore is the sort of scandal mentioned above: When Synge's hero spoke of the "shifts", the undergarments, of Irish women, he brought the house down. At the premiere the performance had to be stopped and irate members of the public had to be calmed by the management. McDonagh, for all his excessive use of taboo words, cannot hope to achieve more than an amused recognition of that futility and his own collusion in it: "I'm too fecking kind-hearted is my fecking trouble. Well I won't be buying the fecker a pint anyways," says Valene in conclusion to The Lonesome West, another play that alludes to Synge's writings in its very title, and such an avalanche of four-letter words is quite characteristic. The storm of invective, the black humour and the altogether more ruthless exposure of human callousness, even viciousness, makes McDonagh's texts more than just the old Synge-song: in all their rootedness in tradition, they are truly modern plays.
Martin McDonagh – The London-Irish 'Wunderkind' of Contemporary Theatre
In 1998 – he was was just 27 then – Martin McDonagh became the first playwright since William Shakespeare to have four of his plays produced professionally in London during a single season. Not bad for a school drop-out with hardly any experience in the dramatic arts and a reasonably low estimate of the stage. London theatre, he once said, bored him; he preferred to get his inspiration from the big screen: Orson Welles, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorcese, David Lynch or Quentin Tarrantino. If pressed to name is favourite play, he comes up with David Mahmet's portrayal of the world of small-crooks in American Buffalo. His first attempts at writing were film scripts and plays for radio and TV – and he collected 22 rejections from the BBC alone, before two of his pieces were accepted by Australian stations.
Once discovered for the stage by Garry Hynes of Galway's Druid Theatre Company, McDonagh's work spread like wildfire, first to London (Royal Court) and then to America, where he was soon to be hailed as "the first great dramatist of the twenty-first century" (Robert Brustein). Encountering his plays – "wildly funny, deeply affecting and grotesquely macabre all at the same time" (Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph) – meant love at first sight for audiences on both sides of the pond. And the awards came rolling in: the George Divine Award for Most Promising Playwright, the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer to the British Stage (both 1996), the London Critics' Circle Award, New York's Drama Desk, Drama League, Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play in 1998, four Tony Awards when The Beauty Queen of Leenane opened on Broadway in 1998, and Time Magazine's number one Best of Theater Award.
In his young but meteoric career Martin McDonagh has been resident playwright at the Royal National Theatre in London, and his plays have already been translated into more than 20 languages.
All his plays are set in the west of Ireland. His first, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), took him just eight days to write; it is the first of the Leenane trilogy. The other two are A Skull in Connemara (1997) and The Lonesome West (1997). A further trilogy is set on the Aran Islands: The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) and The Banshees of Inisheer. And yet, their creator knows the west of Ireland only from summer holidays, and from the tales of his parents and the Irish community in London. The son of a Sligo mother and a Galway father, McDonagh grew up in the shadow of the urban tower blocks of the Elephant & Castle, and then Camberwell, South London.
The 'Wunderkind' of Irish drama has not been without his critics. Is McDonagh exploiting Irish clichés rather than exploring or explaining Ireland? Has he anything original to say? Conventional oldfashioned melodrama, giving "an audience the pleasure of recognition", noted Michael Billington in the Guardian: "His sources are visible for all to see, from Synge to Tarrantino, and his Ireland is based not on real experience of the place but on an almost postmodern recollection of Irish drama in the last century. A playwright of real substance gives us a new territory, and offers us more dilemmas. For me, these elements are missing from Martin's work, but they may well come with experience." And Joel Beers, of Theater Review, concurs: "McDonagh, not much older than 30, is the most celebrated Irish playwright of the past five years. But he has yet to write a great play. He's written a handful of quite enjoyable, funny and shocking plays, but like a topless dancer's vacuous eyes, there isn't a whole lot going on inside."
McDonagh is not over-concerned with these worthy views. Often compared to Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, he wants viewers to leave the theatre feeling the same charge and exhilaration as after a rock concert. And it is mainly the English, he maintains, who have problems with his plays: "The only place I've had any grief is here in London from a few English punters going on about how I was taking the piss out of Irish people." But he feels he does not have to defend anything: "I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both. That's exactly what the work arises out of."
It is early days yet for Martin McDonagh. And asked whether he will always explore despair and violence in his plays, he responded that someday he'll "write a romantic comedy where hardly anyone gets murdered at all." Until then we may enjoy the pitch-black comedy, gothic fun and bleakly comic horror of the likes of The Beauty Queen of Leenane.