ON FEBRUARY 1 1996, at the Town Hall theatre, Druid presented the world premiere of Martin McDonagh’s Beauty Queen Of Leenane thereby launching one of the most spectacularly successful writing careers in modern theatre.
Beauty Queen and McDonagh’s subsequent plays famously went on to take the West End and Broadway by storm, being showered with accolades and awards, and they continue to receive frequent productions all over the world.
In recent years McDonagh has successfully negotiated the transition to cinema, winning an Oscar for his debut short, Six Shooter, and recently directing his first feature film, In Bruges.
Now, more than 12 years since Beauty Queen, McDonagh is once again back in Galway working with Garry Hynes and Druid for a new production of The Cripple of Inishmaan. Meeting up on Monday afternoon in the Town Hall Theatre to talk about the play, it was natural he should start with his memories of Beauty Queen, his momentous debut.
“It was tremendously enjoyable,” McDonagh recalls. “I couldn’t have hoped for a better director or a better set of actors in Beauty Queen. With Garry especially, for me as a first time writer, she was completely open and allowed my voice to be equal to hers in the room. At the time I assumed that’s how it always was but since then I’ve worked with other directors who can be very uptight about the writer being around.
“The freedom we all had then was great, it was one of my fondest experiences doing Beauty Queen and then the Leenane Trilogy. It was like the first time I’d really gotten out of the house! Up until then I was just at home scribbling away. I didn’t have a lot of friends, so socially as well as artistically it was an amazing time for me.”
The Cripple of Inishmaan
The Cripple of Inishmaan was first staged in December 1996 by the Royal National Theatre and was subsequently produced in New York. It’s a black comedy set against the backdrop of the filming of the famous Robert Flaherty documentary Man Of Aran.
Set on 1930s Inishmaan, the inhabitants are excited to learn of a Hollywood film crew's arrival in neighbouring Inis Mór to make a documentary about life on the island. ‘Cripple’ Billy Claven, eager to escape the gossip, poverty, and boredom of Inishmaan, vies for a part in the film, and to everyone's amazement, he gets his chance.
McDonagh discloses the genesis of the play: “I’d already written Lieutenant of Inishmore then got the idea for a trilogy with one play set on each of the Aran Islands. I wrote Cripple fairly quickly even though I didn’t have much idea what it was going to be about when I started it.
“I mainly wanted to do a play with more characters than Beauty Queen had. Then I had the idea of using Man of Aran as a backdrop – I wouldn’t say I was a fan of the film to be honest but that and The Quiet Man were held up as the two great kind of Irish cinematic landmarks when I was growing up.”
One reviewer noted that the play could easily have been titled The Cripples of Inishmaan with Billy’s physical handicap being mirrored by the emotional crippledom of many of the other characters. McDonagh concurs, admitting that “in some ways Billy is the least crippled of them all”.
While the play has those trademark flashes of cruel humour recognisable from much of McDonagh’s work, in Cripple these are leavened by notable instances of kindness.
“I hope so,” McDonagh observes. “I think to show heart you also have to show the darkness for the heart to stand out. I don’t think they should just be wearing their good intentions on their sleeve; I try to keep those hidden and hopefully they pop out of their own accord. But nothing I’ve written has been out of any cruelty or misanthropy - just the opposite I think. Like any kind of work, just to sit down on your own and try to write a story or a play is in itself a hopeful act.”
So does this new production of the play bring out any aspects that perhaps didn’t emerge in previous stagings?
“There’s a lot of humour in the play but I think with earlier productions they were maybe weighted too far towards that,” McDonagh notes. “This time I wanted to focus a bit more on the darker side of the play and the truthfulness of the characters rather than the knockabout comedy.
“Yet strangely, it then becomes even funnier the more truthfully it’s played. But that’s also the case in, for example, The Beauty Queen. If you just go for the laughs, you end up losing both the laughs and the sadness whereas if you play the truth of it you get to a much more interesting place. And I think with this cast, which is a really good one, the humour and the darkness are both coming through and the desperation of Billy’s journey is also coming out much more distinctly.”
McDonagh and cinema
While McDonagh’s plays continue to enjoy frequent productions, in recent years he himself has been working more on film, and taking on the dual role of writer-director with both Six Shooter and In Bruges.
“I think I always wanted to direct a film,” he reveals, “whereas I never had any burning desire to direct a play – I still don’t. I think that’s because with plays when I’ve worked with directors in theatre, the good ones allow you to have as much a say in a production as I would ever need.
“But with film the writer’s is the lowest voice in the room, their opinion isn’t respected and they’re shoved out at the earliest opportunity. So to get a vision across in film you pretty much have to direct it yourself. In theatre, when you’re working with good people you don’t need to fight quite so hard. Though I still don’t have a desire to direct a play I enjoyed the process of directing the film.
“We had a long rehearsal period for it and during that I realised what I’d learned over the last 10 years of observing people like Garry and working with actors, that those experiences stood me in good stead.”
While McDonagh’s plays are still frequently staged it is notable that they all date from that prolific period in the mid-to-late 1990s. So now that he has made his mark in film will he be working more in that medium in future?
“Not at all,” he responds. “I’m actually in the middle of writing a new play. I find writing plays easier. To make a feature film takes up so much of your life, like two years pretty much dedicated to that. That aspect of it I found quite hard. The process itself is fun but just having to give so much time to it, I didn’t like so much.
“So at the moment I’m back here involved in this production and I’m writing plays again and I’ll be concentrating on theatre for the next year or two. I won’t be doing anything film-wise in that time; my whole thinking was to make one film and then leave it and see if it was fun or if I could do it. Now I’ve achieved that and I haven’t been put off it as much as I thought I could be - but I’m not going to rush back to film immediately.”
Do the new plays he’s working on have Irish settings? “Quite consciously not,” he declares. “Their settings are more American or non-specific like in Pillowman. I will go back to an Irish play or two at some point. There’s the final part of the Aran Island trilogy, Banshees of Inisheer which I’d like to finish - its current version isn’t right yet, but there’s something about the story which could be good. I will definitely do more Irish stuff but not for a while yet.”
While the promise of new plays to come from McDonagh certainly whets the appetite, in the meantime Galway audiences can also relish the writer’s re-union with Druid in what is sure to be a memorable staging of The Cripple of Inishmaan.
The play runs from Tuesday September 16 to Saturday 27 at 8pm. For tickets contact the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
