The Good, the Bad, and the Irish
It’s not every playwright who can claim he got into a
fist fight with James Bond, but Martin McDonagh sure can. The now infamous
scene took place in 1996 at the Evening Standard Awards. It was a great year
for the up and coming playwright. His first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane was a phenomenal West End hit and he
was about to receive an award for Most Promising New Playwright. Yet, in true
McDonagh form, he showed up to the ceremony with his brother three sheets to
the wind. The two stormed in so loud, obnoxious and vulgar that Sean Connery
himself—always at his Majesty’s service—stepped forward and told the young men
to behave themselves. Needless to say, McDonagh did not take this rebuke
gracefully. “It’s not something that I’m proud of,” he has since confessed,”
but it happened. Yes, that’s right. I squared off with a 66 year old man.” Yet,
the incident did teach him a valuable lesson. “I can tell you one thing, if you
meet him; don’t say anything about the Royal Family. He may be 66, but he
seemed pretty big and vigorous when he had his hands on my shoulders.”
This
is the type of story that makes literary legends. Yet, it is only one of many.
McDonagh’s biography is probably even more outlandish than anything he could dream
of writing. The son of a construction worker and cleaning lady, he dropped out
of school at 16, shunned college because it was “bogus” and spent the following
10 years on the doll watching TV and eating potato chips. During this decade of
leisure, McDonagh watched his brother, John, try to become a writer, and
decided that it might be a good idea to become one too. “Here was a job where
all you had was your head, a pencil and a piece of paper. That’s the coolest
kind of job there is.” So, he marched into his brother’s room and borrowed a
“How To” manual on writing. This new literary pursuit also helped justify his
jobless situation. “It was unemployment with honor.” Then, calamity struck. His unemployment
benefits dried up and he soon found himself working 9-5 as a clerk in a civil
servant’s office. This turn of events only fueled McDonagh’s drive to become a
writer all the more.
The result may not have been overnight success, but
it was close. After failing at short
stories, radio plays and a TV script, he turned to the chapter on
“Playwrighting” in his “How To” manual. Eight days later, according McDonagh,
he had cranked out his first play, The
Beauty Queen of Leenane. The rest is history. Not long after, this native
of
“My first love was always film, “he has said.
“So I try and introduce some cinematic aspects to my plays. A kind of speed. I
like short, sharp, set-ups and scenes. And I like telling stories which is
something that theatre has lost over the last 20 or 30 years and which film
always had. “His idols are not Shakespeare or Chekhov, but rather Martin
Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, David Mamet, and Harold Pinter, with whom he
shares a love of stylized language and the relentless threat of violence.
Theatre
for McDonagh is just a stepping stone. His real goal is to become a filmmaker.
But what kind of films would this Englishman who writes Irish plays make? How
about an Irish spaghetti western? According to McDonagh, “any country that has
a history of crazy guys with guns has a leg up when it comes to doing
films.” Who knows? Maybe Martin McDonagh
will go from being the next John Synge to the next Sergio Leone.
Dan Tarker, Literary Associate