Martin McDonagh

A Casebook

Richard Rankin Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415541688
• eBook ISBN: 9781135868086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book represents the first collection of original critical material on Martin McDonagh, one of the most celebrated young playwrights of the last decade. Credited with reinvigorating contemporary Irish drama, his dark, despairing comedies have been performed extensively both on Broadway and in the West End, culminating in an Olivier Award for the The Pillowman and an Academy Award for his short film Six Shooter.

In Martin McDonagh, Richard Rankin Russell brings together a variety of theoretical perspectives – from globalization to the gothic – to survey McDonagh's plays in unprecedented critical depth. Specially commissioned essays cover topics such as identity politics, the shadow of violence and the role of Catholicism in the work of this most precocious of contemporary dramatists.

Contributors: Marion Castleberry, Brian Cliff, Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, Maria Doyle, Laura Eldred, José Lanters, Patrick Lonergan, Stephanie Pocock, Richard Rankin Russell, Karen Vandevelde

1
The identity politics of Martin McDonagh

José Lanters

Martin McDonagh has been accused by his most hostile critics of writing shallow soap operas and, in his “Irish” plays, of trivializing Irish politics and perpetuating Irish stereotypes. Writing in the Independent, Paul Taylor calls The Pillowman “mere entertainment” written by a playwright with “a disturbingly defective moral sense” (N. pag.) Vera Lustig terms his rural Irish tragicomedies “empty,” and accuses McDonagh of misogyny: “The men [ … ] are naturalistic creations; while the women are painted in crude brush-strokes” (42). Mary Luckhurst bluntly argues that McDonagh “relies on monolithic, prejudicial constructs of rural Ireland to generate himself an income” (35), and objects to the “orgy of random violence” in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, perpetrated by characters who are “all psychopathic morons” incapable of “meaningful political discussion” (36 emphasis in original). However, I will argue that it is precisely through the erasure of boundaries between the trivial and the profound, the fragmentation of identity, and the radical destabilization of traditional norms and values, including those relating to gender and sexuality, that McDonagh’s postmodern plays engage satirically with the foundations of Irish nationalism. Jean-François Lyotard has argued that in contemporary society and culture, “[t]he grand narrative has lost its credibility” (37). Postmodern satire rejects and discredits metanarratives, and focuses instead on the radical contingencies of what Lyotard calls petites histoires or “petits récits” (60): small-scale fictions that are always situational and preliminary. In doing so, postmodern satire exposes the inadequacies of all categories, and indeed of language itself, not (just) as an act of nihilism, but as a way of critiquing the ideology of bourgeois society and the nation state.

The point Stanley Fish makes about irony—that it is “a risky business because one cannot at all be certain that readers will be directed to the ironic meanings one intends” (181)—holds particularly true for McDonagh’s satire: some audience members see his depictions of Ireland as negative representations of the “real thing,” others interpret them as grotesque parodies of stale clichés about the nation and its inhabitants, while still others regard them romantically as the quintessence of Irishness. One female audience member reportedly called The Beauty Queen of Leenane “disgusting. I’ve never seen anything so racist” (quoted in Tymoczko 16), while Richard Harris saw nothing more in the play than “Irish cliché after Irish cliché” (quoted in Dening, “The Wordsmith of Camberwell” N. pag.). A Village Voice reviewer called McDonagh’s islanders “updated stage Oirishmen” (quoted in Mulkerns N. pag.), whereas the World of Hibernia found in McDonagh’s work something “quintessentially Irish—a dark humor that is both sad and uplifting; a story embodied by a furtive, yet honest imagination; and the ability to poeticize language in a manner that is the culmination of centuries of telling a good story” (Adam 70). Fish argues that no text is inherently ironic: both irony and literalness are interpretive ways of reading that occur in “a history in the course of which realities and anchors have been established, although it is always possible, and indeed inevitable, that they will have to be established again.” Such a state of affairs may be distressing to some, “because it seems to doom us to an infinite regress of unstable interpretations; but one can just as easily say that it graces us with an endless succession of interpretive certainties, a reassuring sequence in which one set of obvious and indisputable facts gives way to another” (196).

Many cultural critics have noted that postmodernism is often equated with the depoliticization of art and the absence of a historical perspective. Originating in and responding to the age of mechanical reproduction, postmodern satire has as its primary characteristic a skepticism toward metanarratives of any kind. Moral and political foundations are radically destabilized in postmodern texts, which blur the line between mimetic representation and the medium’s inability to point to anything beyond itself. Characters in such texts are shallow and egotistical, cognitively dysfunctional, and unable to tell truth from lies. Because such satire always implicates itself in the destabilizing process, its irony is often, in Kevin Dettmar’s words, “completely unmarked [ … ] (which, of course, then begs the question of whether it is in fact ironic)” (86). For these reasons, it has been argued that “a cultural stance that operates through the destabilizing of the concepts of positionality, identity, and referentiality creates perhaps insurmountable problems when we try to determine the focus, direction, and purpose of its satirical operation” (Alberti xx). This principle of destabilization explains the widely divergent reactions to McDonagh’s work. Rather than being “apolitical,” such postmodern dramatic satire,¹ questions the very bases on which political decisions are made by heightening “our awareness of the radically contingent nature of every choice we make” (Dettmar 104).

The Pillowman, the third play McDonagh wrote, “but the first he regarded as good” (O’Toole, “Nowhere Man” N. pag.), was written before the “Irish” plays yet subsequently revised and is his most recent play to premiere in production, in 2003. It deals specifically with the question of signification and interpretation. How is meaning created and by whom? How does “surface” relate to “symbol”? In addressing such fundamentals, the work provides a context in which the “Irishness” of McDonagh’s “Irish” plays can be understood. Katurian’s dilemma in The Pillowman is also that of McDonagh, and of his audience: can a writer “just tell stories” (petites histoires) for mere “private” entertainment, or do those stories always end up acquiring unintended (political) meaning, simply by virtue of being out of the author’s hands and in the public sphere? To what extent is an author responsible for what others “do” with his stories once they are “out there”? In 1997, McDonagh told Fintan O’Toole: “I’m not into any kind of definition, any kind of -ism, politically, socially, religiously, all that stuff,” while also admitting that “anything you believe socially or politically will come through even though I try to avoid it as much as I can. My instinct is to always hide my social or political beliefs but it’s natural for something to come out” (“Nowhere Man” N. pag.). In The Pillowman, Katurian makes a similar claim. Echoing McDonagh’s own public statements, the character maintains that he is entirely apolitical and that he aims at avoiding “meaning” anything beyond the surface of the narrative: “No axe to grind, no anything to grind. No social anything whatsoever. [ … ] [U]nless something political came in by accident, or something that seemed political came in, in which case show me where it is. Show me where the bastard is. I’ll take it straight out. Fucking burn it. You know”? (TP 7–8).

McDonagh (and Katurian) refuse to be held responsible for the consequences of their stories’ release into the public sphere. McDonagh has made this artistic disavowal explicitly: “I don’t think that Martin Scorsese can be held responsible because John Hinckley saw Taxi Driver many times and became obsessed with Jodie Foster” (quoted in Pacheco E29). Such abrogation of responsibility is a way of acknowledging that meaning is not inherent in a text but is rather constructed by readers on the basis of what they bring to it by way of context, similar to the way a detective solves a problem by interpreting clues, as in The Pillowman:

Tupolski: The father. [ … ] He represents something, does he?

Katurian: He represents a bad father. He is a bad father. How do you mean, “represents”? [ … ] All the story says, I think, is the father treats the little girl badly. You can draw your own conclusions. [ … ]

Tupolski: And the first conclusion we are drawing is exactly how many stories have you got “a little girl is treated badly,” or “a little boy is treated badly”? [ … ]

Katurian: But that isn’t saying anything, I’m not trying to say anything … [ … ] What, are you trying to say that I’m trying to say that the children represent something? [ … ] That the children represent The People, or something?

Ariet:(approaching) “I am trying to say.” He’s putting words into my fucking mouth now, “I am trying to say,” let alone draw our own fucking conclusions. … (TP 10–12)

Katurian here suggests that his stories, his petites histoires, mean only one thing. But that position assumes there is a stable, straightforward relationship between signifier and signified, created by the author, that can be transmitted intact to a listener.

When Katurian is placed into the position of listening to Tupolski’s story, however, their roles are reversed, and it is Katurian who searches for clues and desires to know the author’s intentions:

Katurian: (pause) So the old man meant for the deaf boy to catch the plane?

Tupolski: Yeah.

Katurian: Oh.

Tupolski: What, didn’t you get that?

Katurian: No, I just thought the boy happened to catch it, like it was an accident.

Tupolski: No. No, the old man wanted to save the boy. That’s why he threw the plane. [ … ]

Katurian: I think it could’ve been more clear. (90–91)

Katurian’s initial conviction that “‘The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story’” (7) holds true only when he speaks from the writer’s position; when he speaks from the point of view of the audience, his attitude is closer to that of Tupolski, who explains: “All this story is to me, this story is a pointer. [ … ] It is saying to me, on the surface I am saying this, but underneath the surface I am saying this other thing” (18–19). Within the context of the satire, neither position can be taken at face value: Tupolski is a detective searching for clues to arrive at “the truth” about a murder case, but he is also, as he tells Katurian, “a high-ranking police officer in a totalitarian fucking dictatorship. What are you doing taking my word about anything?” (23). And Katurian’s attempts to understand his brother’s motivations by relying on what Michal tells him are contradicted by his own guiding motto: “First rule of storytelling. ‘Don’t believe everything you read in the papers’” (40). The only mystery to which McDonagh’s plays provide clues is that of signification itself.

Indeterminacy is a fundamental characteristic of postmodernism that “include[s] all manner of ambiguities, ruptures, and displacements, affecting knowledge and society” (Hassan 168). The Pillowman is set in an unspecified totalitarian dictatorship, whose location could be anywhere between the Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia, and Armenia. National “identity” is problematized: McDonagh provides a number of signifiers which, to an audience well versed in current events and recent history, present themselves as potential clues to a political mystery. However, given that the play premiered more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin wall, the free-floating signifiers do not “add up” to form a reality; they cannot be definitively attached to a signified. The material presents itself as a parody or a reproduction of no original: the play is “something-esque” (TP 18), but the “something” is indeterminate (Kafka’s influence is present, as is Pinter’s and that of the Brothers Grimm, but the references remain elliptical). The text fits Baudrillard’s definition of a simulacrum: “The real [ … ] is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because n...

Table of contents

• Casebooks on Modern Dramatists
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• General Editor’s note
• Introduction
• 1 The identity politics of Martin McDonagh
• 2 Martin McDonagh’s stagecraft
• 3 Comedy and violence in The Beauty Queen of Leenane
• 4 The “ineffectual Father Welsh/Walsh”?: Anti-Catholicism and Catholicism in Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy
• 5 Postmodern theatricality in the Dutch/Flemish adaptation of Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy
• 6 Breaking bodies: The presence of violence on Martin McDonagh’s stage
• 7 Martin McDonagh and the contemporary gothic
• 8 The Pillowman: A new story to tell
• 9 “Never mind the shamrocks”—Globalizing Martin McDonagh
• Appendix: Chronology of Martin McDonagh’s life and works
• Index