Not for the feint of heart

The best way to sum up Martin McDonagh? Quentin Tarantino meets Edward Albee. All three of these plays, also known as the Leenane trilogy, have several things in common: (1) violence (2) black humor (3) grotesque characters and (4) did I mention violence. Like Tarantino, McDonagh's use of violence is mostly humorous. When Maureen smashes her old mothers head with a fire poker, we laugh. We laugh because the poker has been conversed about at great length, about how it would make a supreme weapon. It displays the Chekov adage perfectly - if you show a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it better go off in the third. We also laugh because Muareen and her mother are so nasty, so disgusting and despicable that one of them deserves a sweet release. But not all the characters die - some are beaten with shovels, others crashed into walls, others have their heads shot off: and somehow they return, bloodied, confused, but alive, as stupid and indestructible as ever. And at times the violence is not funny, but chillingly cold - like when Maureen burns her mother's hand in boiling oil. We are caught in between, as our laughs melt into gasps.

Juxtaposed to all this violence is an attention to the prosaic. In an instant the characters can go from arguing about the merits of different brands of potato crisps to pointing a gun at one another's head. Very Tarantinoesque. Think of Vince and Jules tucking their guns into their shorts as they leave the diner in their "dork" t-shirts at the end of Pulp Fiction. One of McDonagh's characters blows off his father's head because he makes fun of his haircut. Sure, all this is funny, but I think McDonagh is also trying to show the petty, ignorant absurdity that is the human condition. Like Edward Albee there is a lot of witty repartee between the characters. They use esoteric words like "maudlin" that belie their boorish ignorance. Two of the brothers call one another "virgin gayboys." I don't know, but there is something funny about brothers calling one another "virgin gayboys." Not far from the way so many of the brothers I knew growing up talked to one another. The construction of the narratives are tight, dramatic, usually with sharp twist at the end. I've heard it before, and it was written in the New Yorker, that McDonagh is finished with play writing. So be it. But if Six Shooter is a sign of where he plans to go with film in the future, rest assured we will be entertained.


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Brilliant Plays

As a translator of different plays from english to spanish I can assure you if there's an outstanding english playwright nowadays, then that's Martin McDonagh... it's only a shame he recently announced he won't be writing any new plays soon and will turn his talent to filmmaking, which is just as great but the theatre will have a terrible absence in years to come.

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Synge-speak a century later?

The comments here reflect the larger debate roiling about McDonagh's use of stereotypical language and stock characters. There definitely is a rhythm sustained in each one of these three, with its ironic echoes of another observer of the West of Ireland, Synge, in his dialogues that veer near parody even as they for other listeners ring true of "English as she is spoken in Ireland." Whether this register is one of cruelty or affection or neither seems to still be an open question when critics and audiences are discussing these plays.

These three plays interlock with each other, with references tying characters and events into those of the other two dramas. Like "Cripple of Inishmaan," these three rely on a twist of a family set-up, a bitter and decades-long rivalry that at last bursts into violence, and a pause halfway on for a letter back from a character off in America or England that'll figure in the rest of the action. Of the three, "Skull" seems to drag on more than the others, perhaps because of its graveside setting that draws the characters into a place and locks them there for a time. "Beauty Queen" relies on a letter never received as its ploy, and while this moves the plot along, it does seem old hat. "Lonesome West" has been, in one review I read, called to task for the "ridiculous" Father Welsh Walsh Welsh (or vice versa), but I found his character the most recognizable of his caricatures, and in this play I believe McDonagh's working slowly towards arguably more empathy with the characters and situations he contrives. Girleen for the first time also gives us somebody we can listen to without feeling like she's distorted beyond all verisimilitude.

McDonagh does love his domestic brutality, and the cartoonish nature of his exaggerated disputes over Kimberleys, Wagon Wheels, Taytos, and the merits of cow burials five years exhumed make for entertaining repartee. With "Pillowman," I wonder if he's exhausted the codding and slagging of his Connemara/Aran forebears; after the "Lieutenant of Inishmore," it seems as if he's gotten sham-roguery out of his system and gone on to more "European" representations of more serious intent. Time will tell if these early plays are only the start of a long career or a burst of energy before calming his post-adolescent shock value gradually diminished into more subtle and intricate--and perhaps then more horrifyingly recognizable--explorations of violence and disruption within the mental worlds, no longer the propped-up Irish settings sketched wittily if loosely here in three Leenane plays from his relative youth.

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