A Broth of a Boy: BILL BRAY savours another slice of Old Ireland from Martin McDonagh in our May production
McDonagh is something of a marvel in contemporary theatre. Born in Camberwell, where he lived with his expatriate Irish parents, he left school at sixteen and spent five years writing radio scripts and collecting rejection notices until two scripts were taken by stations in Australia. He spent eight days writing his first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane which was produced in 1996 and restaged in London in 1997 at the Royal Court with two other plays in his first trilogy. By now, McDonagh was 27 and had altogether four plays showing simultaneously in London. This is something few if any writers of his age have ever accomplished. Moreover, while most of his plays have been set in the west of Ireland, where he has spent summer holidays, he has never lived there. His parents, who are from Galway, eventually returned to Ireland and left Martin and his brother to live in the London flat.
McDonagh watched a great deal of television and movies while he was beginning to write. He found himself essentially bored by theatre in London, calling it "dull." His favourite play at that time was David Mamet's short excursion into the world of petty thieves called American Buffalo. After that, he claims to have been influenced by the films of David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Terence Malick, and Quentin Tarentino.
Judging from the plays he has written, this training was exactly right for him. He has been frequently compared with John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey, two of the most renowned Irish playwrights of the twentieth century. His use of language in Beauty Queen and related plays is very much in the same vein as the language that Synge created for The Playboy of the Western Worldand his other "peasant dramas." Like Synge, McDonagh did not live in the west of Ireland but as a visitor listened to the daily speech of people remote from the city.
McDonagh is a strong case, incidentally, for the cultural advantages of immigration, although one critic, when he appeared on TV in an Armani suit and with a South London accent, yelled: "If this is an Irish playwright, I'm a banana".
His latest success is The Pillowman, a sell-out smash-hit at the National Theatre and now preparing for its premiere in New York.
Director, BARRY HOOPER, writes
Beauty Queen is a deeply disturbing play, an alarming blend of comedy, melodrama, violence and bleak tragedy. Set in 1989 in the small village of Leenane (pronounced leh-nan) in Connemara, County Galway, the play centres on the life of Maureen Folan, a 40-year-old plain, lonely virgin who is the last daughter left at home to care for her manipulative, ageing mother, Mag. Maureen, with a history of mental illness, is trapped in a small cottage and in an overly dependent, seriously dysfunctional relationship with her mother.
The arrival of Pato Dooley, who has come back from England, sparks a romantic interest between himself and Maureen. Finally, with Mag's interference in Maureen's first and possibly final chance of a loving relationship, high comedy gives way to high tension as McDonagh takes the audience on a teeth-gritting ride to the play's shocking conclusion.
Although born in London, he has gained a reputation as a great Irish playwright. Michael Billington of The Guardian stated that "(McDonagh's) Ireland is based not on real experience of the place but on an almost postmodern recollection of Irish drama in the last century." As a child of the Irish diaspora in England, he has both a native place (London) and an imaginary homeland (the west of Ireland). We see this in the jagged fusing of language between the imaginary Irish homeland and the council estates of South London where he grew up. It gives his plays a sense of both these places and of neither of them. His settings are a chaotic region where the banal and grotesque, the terrible and terribly funny, continually merge into each other.
Beauty Queen is the first play in a trilogy of plays set in remote Connemara, County Galway, north of the Aran Islands, where some of the people still speak Irish. The other two plays are A Skull in Connemara (1997) and The Lonesome West (1997).
For my first production at the Geoffrey Whitworth I am delighted to have such a talented cast. Gill Grubb takes the role of the "Beauty Queen', Maureen Folan, with Mavis Dunphy as her exploitative mother, Mag. Pato Dooley is played by GWT regular Chris Cole and his younger brother, Ray, by newcomer, Michael Bate.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is an evening of dark comedy you will not soon forget. |
