Martin McDonagh

Original scanned copy. April 2005

Explores Maureen Folan, in Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," as a psychological borderline, someone who is afraid to achieve a man she can have a relationship with, and so defaults to using him as simply another object she can use in warfare against a mother she is only yet capable of playing at being able to leave behind her.

The idea of monstrosity is closely allied with the articulation of monsters in visual culture. In literature, especially in Gothic woks, it implies the spectacles of violence in which real monsters play a pivotal role in setting the events in motion. This paper investigates monstrosity as a metaphor for human acts of violence both physically and psychologically. It explores monstrosity in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. McDonagh raises the problem of monstrosity and monstrous identities in his country, Ireland. He focuses on domestic violence which is incarnated in the characters of two women: Mag and her daughter Maureen who mistakenly think of violence as a meditator of achieving self-realization. McDonagh emphasizes the fact that monstrosity is a distinctive hallmark of the Irish society because people lose the sense of humanity.

We are in the screenplay – because we are in Bruges. With the very beginning of this screenplay by Martin McDonagh we dive into its very title. Shots of the city's architecture introduce it to us before we can see any of the characters. The importance of the place is obvious – it is in the title and since it is in the title it is only logical to start the film with it. It may be understood as a character itself. The architecture can therefore be regarded as its characterization. The way the city is represented in the initial shots sets a certain tone: it is cold, eerily Gothic, unmodern. It fits the story that Ray, one of the characters, tells in voice over. (Later on there will be shots presenting us a very pretty and Christmassy Bruges, and that also will fit a certain purpose.) Without giving many details, we immediately find out what the situation is: Ray (even though we do not know his name yet) has committed a lethal crime, more than one have died, he is not the only one involved in this crime, and, in relation to this crime, there has been a problem and he has been sent to Bruges together with somebody else – which is not little information given in only a few lines without any visual support (that is, pictures of what has happened, not of Bruges's architecture). What is more, it is exactly the amount of information that leaves us, the audience, not completely in the dark, but has us ask for more, since it raises more questions than it answers: 'Who has been killed?', 'Who is it that sends him to Bruges?', and 'Why to Bruges?' Since Bruges is with a little over 100,000 inhabitants not exactly a big city, and since it is not known to be one of the first stops for tourists in Europe, it is very likely that a majority of this film's audience have never been to Bruges. In fact, it is even likely that a majority have never even heard of Bruges. This is important, because neither have Ray and Ken ever been to Bruges – and in the very first scene where we can actually see them, they are arriving there. We are therefore arriving with them; they do not get a head start. They know as little about it as we do and we are going to explore the city together with them. They have to play tourists, so we can play tourists too. Two protagonists quickly develop within the first ten pages of IN BRUGES – Ray and Ken. The fact that we can hear them before we can see them gives free rein to our first impressions of them: one is a pessimist (who turns out to be Ray) and the other is an optimist. Since the film starts with Ray's voice over, since we know that he has murdered somebody, and since he seems to be the more troublesome character, so to say, he sticks out as a protagonist more than Ken. Neither of them is easy to label with respect to characterization, since neither of them is a true extrovert nor introvert. Ken appears to be much more sensible and balanced – yet we can guess that he also is a gangster, and before we know what his situation is really, it is hard to identify with him or rely on him.

This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh, who has embraced the epithet “The Irish Salman Rushdie”. When considered in tandem, both writers are revealed as irreverent postcolonial artists using absurd representations to mock the hypermasculine persona and reveal its dangerous ideology as a foundation of terrorist thinking. The article traces the trope of the “Pillowman” assassin, used by both writers to signify emasculated male characters who turn to violence out of shame. The inverted logic these characters espouse is examined and shown to signal the fallacy of accepting violence as an essential facet of masculinity. When viewed in this framework, the work of Rushdie and McDonagh suggests that the drive towards aggressive masculinity in postcolonial settings acts as a vestigial by-product of the colonial power structure.

The Pillowman dramatizes the interrogation and torture of a horror ction writer, Katurian, whose stories have been re-enacted in ‘real’ life without his knowledge. The audience gradually nds out that the murders are the crimes of Michal, Katurian’s mentally retarded brother, who had been physically tortured by his parents in childhood, until Katurian murdered them. Upon Michal’s confession, Katurian has to kill his brother to save him from the suffering and torture to come. Subsequently, it becomes clear that the two interrogators also suffer from the violent childhoods they re-enact with the violence they inict on their suspects. It appears that all kinds of violence in the play are somehow justied, and treated in such a complex way that it becomes hard to draw boundaries between victims and perpetrators. The depiction of violence can, however, also be examined in dimensions that trigger and shape each other: the violence of the totalitarian state directed against the individual and the artist; domestic violence; the ctional violence found in Katurian’s stories. Read through Slavoy Žižek’s theory of violence, which also highlights the interconnected nature of its several kinds, The Pillowman can be observed to create a panoramic view of its subject. Mahinur Ak ehir-Uygur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Manisa Celal Bayar University in Manisa, Turkey. Her areas of interest are satirical literature, contemporary ction, and women’s literature.

As many critics have pointed out, Martin McDonagh’s work for the stage and screen is deeply indebted to the drama of Samuel Beckett. While critics have spotted most of McDonagh’s intertextual debts to Beckett, they have curiously failed to recognise that his Oscar-winning short film, Six Shooter (2004), draws heavily on Beckett’s classic radio play, All That Fall (1957). As Julia Kristeva contends, intertextuality always involves the ‘absorption and transformation’ of the earlier text. There is much evidence of All That Fall's 'absorption' into Six Shooter: both works centrally feature trains, the death of young children, childless couples, animals, reflections on Christianity, and haunting Irish memories which inspire bizarre and, indeed, violent behaviour in the present. As regards ‘transformation’, McDonagh’s film challenges and updates the reflections on Christianity, adult-child relationships, and Dublin found in Beckett’s play, and McDonagh uses the visual medium of film to extend the unexploited ‘performativity’ of Beckett’s earlier, audio work.

[Originally delivered as a conference paper at the 2012 "Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland" Conference at University College Dublin.]

The focus of this final paper is on the analysis of Martin McDonagh’s first non-Irish play called The Pillowman, as well as on the elements of crime fiction genre which are present in the play. Due to the fact that the genre of crime fiction is rather complex and vaguely defined, the emphasis of the first part of this paper is on the description of the development of the genre and its most notable elements. The most relevant elements of crime fiction genre for the play are: embedded story, anticipation, and retroversion. They are mostly used for the creation of the notion of suspense. However, the interesting aspect of this literary work lies in the fact that The Pillowman is also rich with deviations from the crime fiction genre. These deviations are most evident in the subversion of the archetypal roles of crime fiction characters. Furthermore, the treatment of the characters in the play is different from the treatment of typical crime fiction characters because there is no fair-play balance between them. Every character is morally dubious and changes his role throughout the storyline. Overall, the combination of crime fiction elements as well as their deviations is something that makes this play one of Martin McDonagh’s most interesting works.

Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen(2015) is a contextual play as the work derives its material from an actual historical event, the abolition of capital punishment in the 1960s, and presents this topic at a time in which the same issue is debated again in 2015. The play refers to two distinct socio-historical backgrounds, 1960s Britain as the context of the plot, and the 21stcentury as the context of the audience/reader. Hangmentakes place in a very specific date in history, the year in which hanging was suspended in Britain. The portrayal of what seems to be the last hanging case in the country makes it possible to problematise the integrity of the judicial system at the time. Presentation of the rivalry between two famous executioners in the country, Harry Allen and Albert Pierrepoint, also underlines the play’s socio-political relation to a certain context. What is equally noteworthy about Hangmenis McDonagh’s choice of this topic at a time in which the issue of capital punishment is raised again in Britain. Concerning recent arguments about the reintroduction of death penalty in 2015, it is observed that McDonagh also initiates a discussion concerning the legitimation of state violence through a depiction of the history of hanging. In light of this observation, the aim of this article is to discuss McDonagh’s topical dark comedy as a political intervention in the debate over death penalty in Britain by providing appropriate case studies of several hanging offences in the history of Britain.

Martin McDonagh’s screenplay In Bruges makes repeated use of symbolism from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych painting "The Last Judgement", especially in the film’s final scene. This is part of McDonagh’s careful and deliberate attempt to suggest that Bruges in the film represents Purgatory. The sleepy, medieval town is the liminal space in which the Irish gangster, Ray, has been condemned to wait for the "Last Judgement" of his Cockney crime boss, Harry. Ray’s frustration with what he sees as the lack of excitement in Bruges, combined with his fear over the state of his soul and the sanctification that he is forced to undergo while in the town, all make Bruges a Purgatory from which he longs to be delivered. Deepening this eschatological symbolism is the fact that Ray’s partner, Ken (a fellow Irish gangster), is a Christ-figure in the film. Not only does Ken lay down his life in the hopes of saving Ray, he is also linked to Christ repeatedly throughout the film, both through his own words and actions and those of others.

Local history has a role to play in the illumination of family history particularly where family records are scarce. This paper features some background information on Lettermullen, including reference to its first documented inhabitants, Ochaghy (O’Flaherty) in 1574 and Morogh McHugh in 1584; the defence garrison in Lettermullen Castle in 1622; the mysterious Neptune Lynch of Lettermullen whose daughter, Mary, married Nicholas Lynch III of Barna, Co Galway in 1719; the Tithe Applotment survey of Lettermullen in the 1820s which identified Nicholas Lynch V of Barna as landlord, as well as ancestors and relatives of Treasa Ní Chonaola  bearing the surnames Adley, Barrett, Conneely, Flaherty, McDonagh, Perkins, Toole and Walsh; extracts from British Parliamentary Papers and The Times newspaper, London concerning Lettermullen, including the manslaughter of Mrs King of Lettermullen in 1873; and the pioneering study of Dr Charles Browne of Trinity College Dublin in 1898 featuring the red-haired Michael McDonagh who may have been a younger brother of Seamus Rua McDonagh of Creig, Lettermullen and thereby a granduncle of Treasa Ní Chonaola. Other items featured include the origin and distribution of the Conneely/Connolly name, family and house photographs, an eight generation descendant chart (including playright, Martin McDonagh), population data (1841-2002), an archaeological inventory, and the names of Lettermullen men who served in the British army.

Through feminist theories of masculinity, this article addresses how hypermasculinity creates shame, which subsequently drives violence in Martin McDonagh’s films In Bruges (2008) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). I argue that McDonagh’s technical and thematic use of repetitive retraction—placing an idea on screen only to undermine it—offers a subversive critique of how hypermasculinity propels a cycle of violence. By conspicuously staging and then removing hypermasculine utterances, McDonagh’s films suggest the potential for alternative forms of masculinity that allow men to connect with others and exercise their emotional range.

With in-yer-face theatre, according to Alex Sierz, 'Violence becomes impossible to ignore when it confronts you by showing pain, humiliation and degradation [….] Violent acts are shocking because they break the rules of debate; they go beyond words and can get out of control. Violence feels primitive, irrational and destructive. Violence onstage also disturbs when we feel the emotion behind the acting, or catch ourselves enjoying the violence vicariously.' Discuss this statement in relation to McDonagh's work. (Alex Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre, pp. 8-9)

Psychotic as he is, does Mad Padraic in The Lieutenant of Inishmore represent anyone in the real world? I contend that critics have very largely overlooked an obvious real-life, Irish republican who providedMcDonagh with a model (of sorts) for Padraic.
This paper will show that McDonagh based “Lieutenant” Padraic on Dominic “Mad Dog” McGlinchey, a leader of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), but that some of McDonagh’s information was derived from a highly inaccurate image of McGlinchey provided by sensationalist British and Irish newspaper reports at the time of the prolific murderer’s heyday. In fact, rather than critiquing state-created stereotypes of Irish Republican violence, McDonagh may be the unwitting dupe of British military propaganda. I suggest that two cats in the play are the analogues of famous Irish republicans and I will also offer a likely explanation for the lengthy wait that the play endured before reaching the British stage

https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss3/1/
In his film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, writer-director Martin McDonagh creates a compelling parable regarding suffering, justice and solidarity. This unfiltered and witty, dark comedy examines the interlaced connections between humans and non-human agents during periods of anguish. Frequently, the ensuing communication includes abusive or belittling language and violent physical attacks. These extraordinary assaults are then contrasted with small gestures of kindness. While the film has faced various critiques, this piece of cinema creates a dynamic narrative to consider the human experience of grief and experiencing grace from one’s enemies. In doing so, Three Billboards paints an inclusive message of solidarity with its exaggerated characters and offers insight into audience expectations of heroes and villains.

Writing of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Fintan O’Toole notes: “The domestic details—Kimberley biscuits, Lumpy Complan, Tayto crisps, sausage rolls—that ought to provide a ‘realistic’ backdrop to the action are instead pushed relentlessly into the foreground by McDonagh’s brilliant dialogue […] objects like cookers, cooking oil and pokers become portents of violence and cruelty.” This results, according to O’Toole, in the simultaneous following and parodying of “the conversations of domestic drama."  In the
Trilogy, O’Toole finds that, “almost everything that gave old Ireland its sense of itself is gone. The Church is falling apart. Religion is a spent force, and its remains reside in weird vestiges like Valene’s figurines of saints and Virgins or the vol-au-vents that are served with funerals." All this is correct; what O’Toole has failed to note, however, is that two snacks that hold particularly strong nationalistic significance for the Irish—Kimberley biscuits (Oreo-like cookies) and Tayto crisps (a brand of potato chip)—are the focus in the Trilogy of treatment that represents a comic deepening and continuation of that pulling apart of the old reverence for things traditionally Irish. This paper will examine this process as applied by the playwright to Kimberleys in Beauty Queen and Taytos in The Lonesome West.
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The Beauty Queen of Leenane, written by English/Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, presents many striking themes. In the aspect of in-yer-face theater, the shocking verbal and non-verbal violence, committed by a demanding mother, Mag, and her daughter, Maureen,  challenges us to question the binary oppositions such as good/evil, normal/abnormal, and right/wrong etc. What begins as a normal seeming scene of the dysfunctional relationship of a mother and a daughter turns into a reflection of socio-political, socio-economic, socio-cultural, and psycho-sociological problems, encountered by Irish people of 1990s, in the flow of characters' actions.

In his film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, writer-director Martin McDonagh creates a compelling parable regarding suffering, justice and solidarity. This unfiltered and witty, dark comedy examines the interlaced connections between humans and non-human agents during periods of anguish. Frequently, the ensuing communication includes abusive or belittling language and violent physical attacks. These extraordinary assaults are then contrasted with small gestures of kindness. While the film has faced various critiques, this piece of cinema creates a dynamic narrative to consider the human experience of grief and experiencing grace from one’s enemies. In doing so, Three Billboards paints an inclusive message of solidarity with its exaggerated characters and offers insight into audience expectations of heroes and villains. This article is available in Journal of Religion & Film: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss3/1 In his film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Mi...

Cathleen ni Houlihan’s resonant central image of the nation-as-woman/queen has become one that later generations of Irish dramatists respond to and critique. This exploration will suggest that this image inspired little respect in the drama produced by the conflicted post-war Irish in England in particular, who felt allegiance neither to the motherland they were obliged to leave nor to their adopted mother, Britannia. This outlook will be linked to the punk movement of 1970s Britain, which was arguably one in which the offspring of post-war Irish immigrants played a pivotal role and whose anarchist message was disseminated worldwide by a defaced image of Queen Elizabeth II. Such analysis will be used to contextualize the work of British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who has been repeatedly labelled a “punk playwright,” and to suggest that the reduced “queen” of his most iconoclastic play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), negates both the female sovereign of the land of his birth and Yeats and Gregory’s seemingly failed Irish alternative.

Bu çalışma Martin McDonagh'ın Leenane'in Güzellik Kraliçesi oyunundaki anne-kızın çatışma nedenlerine odaklanmaktadır. Yirmi birinci yüzyıl yaklaşırken Birleşik Krallığı'n tiyatro sahnelerinde yeni bir genç oyun yazarları akımı ortaya çıkar. Bu dalganın en tartışmalı ve sevilen temsilcilerinden biri Martin McDonagh'dır. Yazar İrlandalı bir ailenin oğlu olarak Londra'da doğup büyümüştür. 1996'da McDonagh'ın ilk oyunu olan Leenane'nin Güzellik Kraliçesi İrlanda'da sahnelendikten sonra Londra ve New York'ta yerini bularak oldukça fazla ilgi görür. Türkiye'de de sahnelenen ve dört karakterden oluşan bu oyun McDonagh'ın olağanüstü tiyatro kariyerinin başlangıç noktası olur. Oyunda kırk yaşındaki bekâr bir kadın olan Maureen hâlâ otoriter annesi Mag ile birlikte yaşamaktadır. Günleri yemek yapmak, tavuklara bakmak ve alışveriş yapmakla geçen Maureen yıllardır hasta ve huysuz annesiyle kendi başına ilgilenmektedir. Leenane'in Güzellik Kraliçesi'nde Maureen ve Mag, fiziksel konumları ve birbirleriyle olan ilişkileri nedeniyle soyutlanmış bir hayat sürmektedirler. Maureen, annesinin evinden ve Leenane gibi küçük bir kasaba ortamından kurtulmanın hayalini kurmaktadır. İçinde bulunduğu acınası durum için annesini ve kız kardeşlerini suçlamaktadır. Anne-kızın karşılıklı sert, kaba ve incitici konuşmaları hep çatışma ile sürmektedir. Oyun ilerledikçe iki karakter arasındaki bu ilişkinin tamamen parçalandığını görürüz.

Explores Maureen Folan, in Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," as a psychological borderline, someone who is afraid to achieve a man she can have a relationship with, and so defaults to using him as simply another object she can use in warfare against a mother she is only yet capable of playing at being able to leave behind her.

Explores Maureen Folan, in Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," as a psychological borderline, someone who is afraid to achieve a man she can have a relationship with, and so defaults to using him as simply another object she can use in warfare against a mother she is only yet capable of playing at being able to leave behind her.

March 2005

Why did Synge vehemently predict the disappearance of a language that he loved and could speak with no small fluency? Brian O Conchubhair’s ground-breaking Fin de Siècle na Gaelige (2009) situates the Gaelic Revival within the broad contexts of contemporaneous European intellectual, social, and literary trends. I show that Synge’s understanding of evolutionary theory (and particularly of Spencer’s misapplied phrase, “survival of the fittest”) suggested to him that a linguistic tradition rooted in “a small island placed between two countries which speak [English]” was not fit for survival. In writing of Irish, Synge deploys the vocabulary of early nineteenth-century linguistics, which depicted language as an organism that grows and decays. For an author forever affected by his initial traumatic encounter with Darwin, the understanding that Irish was a biological entity — and that as such it was subject to the laws of evolution — was potentially alarming. The implication of Synge’s use of horticultural vocabulary to discuss the contemporary linguistic status of Ireland (“blossom”, “decay”, “old roots”, “new growth”) is that the heightened Hiberno-English utilized in his plays is a vigorous hybrid resulting from the grafting of an Irish language shoot onto the stronger stock of English. In Darwinian terms, Hiberno-English is the “new and improved form” that inevitably replaces the outmoded “old forms” of enfeebled Irish and what Synge considered to be the inadequate English of a colonized people.  The popular concept of the perfected nature of the hybrid plant underlines such references to Hiberno-English. In contemplating the future of Irish, Synge ultimately overcomes the nihilism that evolutionary theory had imparted in him during his youth; “pure” Irish might become extinct, but its rhythm and energy would survive in the literary Hiberno-English of Playboy of he Western World and its ilk.

Martin McDonagh: A casebook 77 5 Postmodern theatricality in the Dutch/Flemish adaptation of Martin McDonagh's The Leenane Trilogy Karen Vandevelde In the theater season of 2000–2001, a Dutch and Flemish theater company collaboratively staged Martin ...

This study is focused on intertextual interpretation over the common elements in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman. Both plays are excellent examples of how reality and imagination interact with one another. Waiting for Godot and The Pillowman are psychological plays that explore the relationship around existentialism, death, and future hope.

In this essay I offer a reading of Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman, staged in 2003 at London’s National Theatre, as a signature post-9/11 dystopia, a compelling parable about the state of exception as the signum of the new world order, and about the war on terror as its fullest manifestation to date. By pivoting the entire plot on the act of telling, enacting and interpreting the stories authored by the protagonist as well as his oppressors, McDonagh’s play throws a highly ambivalent light on the relationship between the fictitious world conjured up by its tales of terror, the real experiences they supposedly originate from, and the violence which they, in turn, are seen as able to generate. In particular, I point out that the play’s ability to engage with the current historical paradigm resides on more than one level in its heightened narrativity and, indeed, its fable-like aspects.

Focusing on drama, and recent Irish drama in particular, this essay recognizes the problematic, even paradoxical, nature of the influence of Samuel Beckett and asks how later playwrights might be seen to react to, and work with, this influence. Beckett’s own response to the artistic presence of his own literary 'father', James Joyce, is described, and suggestive instances of infanticide in his own work examined. The essay goes on to identify those structural and thematic features in Beckett’s drama which are recognizable in the work of more recent Irish playwrights, and concludes with accounts of plays by Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Martin McDonagh which indicate how these writers revise, shape or contest elements derived from Beckett.

Review of one of the most provocative Irish short films in recent years, a work that manages not just to reference acclaimed playwright and director Martin McDonagh’s major influences but also provides a commentary on representations of Ireland in cinema.