The Stage Irish Are Dead, Long Live the Stage Irish: The Lonesome West and A Skull in Connemara

Paul Murphy

When the brothers Valene and Coleman Connor learn of Father Welsh’s suicide from Girleen Kelleher in Martin McDonagh’s play The Lonesome West, their initial response is one of nervous amusement until the enormity of the situation hits them:

Coleman: (pause) Did you see ‘Roderick’ his name is?

Valene: (snorts) I did.

Coleman: (pause. Seriously) We shouldn’t laugh.

Valene nods. Both pull serious faces. Blackout.’⁴⁶¹

In this brief exchange we witness the incursion of a traumatic event; the knee-jerk reaction to that event with nervous amusement; then the guilty recognition that such a reaction is ethically dubious. The first two stages of this exchange are typical of McDonagh’s theatrical formula in the deployment of a common human response to traumatic events, and could go some way to explaining his popular success in the UK, Ireland, and the USA. The third stage of this exchange however is untypical as it involves somber reflection on the ethics of laughing away the traumatic effects of another person’s demise, the reflective quality of which is made more profound because the exchange ends the scene, thus allowing the audience time to reflect. Such moments are rare in a fast and furious style based largely on proven devices from the theatrical traditions of farce and melodrama. The problem which this chapter focuses on is McDonagh’s reliance upon the first two stages of this device, which involves the comic mediation of traumatic events in The Lonesome West and is the hallmark of his style in the related plays in the Leenane trilogy, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and A Skull in Connemara. To analyse this problem I will combine a traditional text-based reading of The Lonesome West with a performance analysis of the An Grianán Theatre/Lyric Theatre co-production of the play at the Lyric Theatre from 16 September to 15 October, during its tour in Autumn 2005. I will relate the comic mediation of trauma to the notion of Stage Irishry allegedly inherent to McDonagh’s dramaturgy, and conclude that the popular acclaim which McDonagh’s plays have received involves a degree of complicity with and even endorsement of the comic mediation of pain and suffering.

Much of the debate around McDonagh’s work has engaged with his London-Irish provenance; his insistence that he is an Irish playwright; and the veracity of his representation of Irish rural communities. Anthony Roche notes that:

the charge of stage Irishry, and in particular of racial stereotyping and mis-representation of the Irish peasant as prone to violence, has been levelled at McDonagh, as it was before him at Synge. These writers, it is claimed, do not know these people and substitute for their lack of understanding a wilful and calculated stage effect.⁴⁶²

For Roche, the question ‘whether negatively or positively put, has to do with distance’ and he cites Thomas Kilroy’s observation that plays by Anglo-Irish dramatists involve ‘a characteristic distancing effect, a cool remove of the playwright from his subject matter”’.⁴⁶³ Later in the article Roche questions Kilroy’s implication that ‘a native Catholic playwright could achieve an almost unmediated intimacy with his or her audience’, and engages with the ‘generally accepted humour in McDonagh’s plays and their infliction of pain’, concluding that ‘there is relish of the sadism and punishment for its own sake’.⁴⁶⁴

What is interesting here is Roche’s adroit shift from the debate on national identity and its link to representational authenticity which has formed the superstructure of many debates in Irish theatre studies, to a focus on the ethics of McDonagh’s autotelic representation of pain and suffering. Aleks Sierz situates McDonagh’s plays in the ‘in-yer-face’ genre of 1990s British New Brutalist theatre, arguing that

[h]owever hilarious, they seemed to be repeating the same postmodern trick[…] they do lack compassion. If this does not matter too much in one play, its absence in a trilogy leads to a sense of depressing futility.⁴⁶⁵

Sierz suggests that the ‘widest definition of in-yer-face theatre is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message.’⁴⁶⁶ With in-yer-face

the language is usually filthy, characters talk about unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each other, experience unpleasant emotions, become suddenly violent.⁴⁶⁷

Many of these elements are part and parcel of McDonagh’s theatrical formula, but the message that is supposed to underlie and ultimately justify the vulgarity and brutality is obscured to the point of nullity.

The grab-the-audience-by-the-scruff-of-the-neck approach is evident in the opening scene of The Lonesome West. Coleman remarks under his breath what a ‘dumb fecking question’ it is to ask the alcoholic priest Father Welsh for a drink, after they have just buried Coleman and Valene’s father. When Welsh remarks that ‘Valene does be a biteen tight with his money,’ Coleman retorts:

A biteen? He’d steal the shite out of a burning pig, and this is his poteen too, so if he comes in shouting the odds tell him you asked me outright for it. Say you sure enough demanded. That won’t be hard to believe.⁴⁶⁸

As far as Coleman is concerned, the mourners at the funeral are a ‘pack of vultures only coming nosing’ with ‘Maryjohnny’ singled-out for particular scorn:

Vol-au-vents, feck. The white-haired oul ghoulish fecking whore. She’s owed me the price of a pint since nineteen-seventy-fecking-seven. It’s always tomorrow with that bitch. I don’t care if she does have Alzheimer’s. If I had a vol-au-vent I’d shove it up her arse.⁴⁶⁹

When Valene returns with more of his beloved figurines of Catholic saints, the dysfunctional relationship between the siblings is made abundantly clear:

Valene: Fibreglass.

Coleman: (pause) Feck fibre-glass.

Valene: No, feck you instead of feck fibreglass.

Coleman: No, feck you two times instead of feck fibreglass.⁴⁷⁰

The response which I witnessed to this opening gambit from Lyric audiences across the run from the first night through several performances up to the closing night, was regularly one which began with nervous giggling at the start of the scene, developing to muted sniggering and then raucous laughter as the remorseless rhythm of sarcasm kept pounding on.

The vulgar tone continues unabated in the rest of the scene when the seventeen-year-old Girleen (capably performed by Charlene McKenna) enters intent on selling poteen to Valene, and responds with indifference to news of the funeral as she delivers a letter from the postman she met on the way in:

Girleen: That postman fancies me, d’you know? I think he’d like to be getting into me knickers, in fact I’m sure of it.

Coleman: Him and the rest of Galway, Girleen.

Welsh puts his head in his hands at this talk.

Girleen: Galway minimum. The EC more like. Well, a fella won’t be getting into my knickers on a postman’s wages. I’ll tell you that, now.⁴⁷¹

When Valene tries to swindle her out of a pound her response is as ferocious as it is irreverent:

Girleen: You’re the king of stink-scum fecking filth-bastards you, ya bitch-feck, Valene.

Welsh: Don’t be swearing like that now, Girleen.

Girleen: Ah me hairy arse, Father.⁴⁷²

A Skull in Connemara similarly opens with smutty references to teenage sexuality conjoined with sacrilegious banter. When the septuagenarian Maryjohnny catches the local school children kissing she calls them ‘a pack o’ whores’ and complains about them to the quinquagenarian Mick Dowd:

No harm to anybody, is it, Mick? And the three I caught weeing in the churchyard and when I told them I’d tell Father Cafferty, what did they call me? A fat oul biddy!⁴⁷³

Maryjohnny’s vinegary attitude is paralleled in the same scene in the interaction between Mick and the young Mairtin Hanlon whose conversation is more diatribe than dialogue. Mairtin’s constant begging for poteen irritates Mick into a display of malice:

Mick: pours a small amount of poteen out onto his fingers and tosses it at Mairtin as if it’s holy water. It hits Mairtin in the eyes. Bless yourself, now, Mairtin.⁴⁷⁴

Spiteful provocation is also the order of the day in The Lonesome West as Coleman and Valene seize every opportunity to savage each other. When the letter Girleen delivers is revealed to be Valene’s inheritance cheque which he rubs under the disinherited Coleman’s nose, a fight breaks out between the brothers and the beleaguered Welsh gets a kick in the shin for trying to break them up:

Welsh: What kind of a town is this at all? Brothers fighting and lasses peddling booze and two fecking murderers on the loose?

Girleen: And me pregnant on top of it. (Pause.) I’m not really.

Welsh looks at her and them sadly, moving somewhat drunkenly to the door.⁴⁷⁵

The answer to Welsh’s question is of course that the ‘town’ is a conglomeration of social problems which are hyperbolized through slapstick routines that serve to render the characters as clowns and thus desensitize the audience to the trauma underlying the representation of those problems in theatrical form. Judging from their jovial reaction the Lyric audiences consistently received the play as a broad farce, and while the roles of Valene and Coleman were exquisitely played respectively by Frank McCusker and Lalor Roddy, and skilfully directed by Mikel Murfi, the traumatic effects of the social problems which are alluded to in the play are subdued by its farcical nature.

McDonagh’s plays are often discussed in relation to those of J.M. Synge and debate usually centers on their representation and/or perceived misrepresentation of rural communities. While the comparisons are understandable insofar as McDonagh offers a postmodern debunking of truisms about the West of Ireland that have accumulated over the years, in contradistinction to Synge’s modernist fetishization of peasant life on the western seaboard and derogation of bourgeois aspiration,⁴⁷⁶ a more useful comparison would be with Sean O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy. In Twentieth Century Irish Drama Christopher Murray argues that

[f]rom the perspective of the 1990s O’Casey stands out as Ireland’s greatest playwright of the century. He it was who most passionately, most powerfully and most memorably dramatized the traumatic birth of a nation […] He was the first English-speaking dramatist to make the poor, the undereducated and the dispossessed the subjects of modern tragi-comedy.⁴⁷⁷

In contrast Declan Kiberd states that

O’Casey’s code scarcely moved beyond a sentimentalization of victims, and this in turn led him to a profound distrust of anyone who makes an idea the basis for an action.⁴⁷⁸

Kiberd suggests that The Plough and the Stars is indicative of O’Casey’s uneven account of the birth of a nation insofar as

the nationalist case is never put, merely mocked.[…] not for even twenty minutes of a two-and-a-half hour play are the rebels allowed to state their case. The extracts used from Pearse’s speeches are highly selective, focusing on his blood-rhetoric at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa, but giving no indication of his support for Dublin workers during the Lock Out of 1913.⁴⁷⁹

Sentimentalization of victims is the key issue in O’Casey’s representation of socially subordinate characters, especially in the deployment of comedy as a dramaturgical strategy which mediates class disparity. Comic mediation is indicated in Aristotle’s definition of comedy as

an imitation of inferior people – not, however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful. The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction; for example, a comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not involve pain.⁴⁸⁰

In this sense one can see how comedy can be used as a way of mediating the trauma of class disparity, to render socially ‘inferior’ people as ridiculous and ‘disgraceful’ in a way that ‘is ugly and distorted, but does not involve [the] pain’ of absorbing the opprobrium intrinsic to that social inferiority. Kiberd notes O’Casey’s ‘delight in the comic male pair’, highlighting the influence upon his dramaturgy of Victorian melodrama, especially the work of Dion Boucicault which goes some way to explain O’Casey’s popular appeal which ‘saved the Abbey from financial ruin by wooing large numbers of the Queen’s audience to his plays’.⁴⁸¹

While O’Casey registers the social symptoms inherent to bourgeois hierarchies, he does so in a way which mediates the antagonistic nature of those hierarchies, turning the Dublin proletariat into a spectacle to be viewed from a safe symbolic distance. O’Casey’s reliance on comedy to soften the edge of his dramatic representation can be explained somewhat in this extract from Joseph Holloway’s journal:

I was speaking to Sean O’Casey who doesn’t like [T.C.] Murray’s plays because they take too much out of him. Both Birthright and Maurice Harte distressed him very much in witnessing. He likes his plays with brightness intermingled with sadness. The comedy of life appeals to him most. […] O’Casey loves Shaw’s work because in the very kernel of tragedy he can introduce something to make one laugh its sting away. Murray never does this his tragedy is ever unrelieved.⁴⁸²

Where O’Casey uses comic mediation to over-sentimentalize his characters, McDonagh uses the same device to radically de-sentimentalize his characters – in both cases comic mediation serves to neutralize or at the very least diminish rather than enhance a traumatic effect on the audience. The effect to be achieved is of course a matter of interpretation of the play for the stage and direction of the play on the stage, and while the performance accretions since the first productions of O’Casey’s plays have resulted in a legacy of increasingly broad, comic renditions, Garry Hynes’s 1991 production of The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre served to heighten the traumatic potential of the play.⁴⁸³ Whether McDonagh’s plays will have to wait a similar period of time before the traumatic potential is realized remains to be seen, as the performance accretions since their first productions in the 1990s have resulted in a legacy not dissimilar to O’Casey’s, specifically where UK and USA receptions of McDonagh’s work are concerned, which will be discussed in the conclusion to this chapter.

The poet F.R. Higgins’s reaction to the first production of The Plough and the Stars and the concomitant protests at the production, constitutes an acerbic analysis of O’Casey’s portrayal of Dublin life:

One is eager to have the opinions of our dramatic critics on a technique largely based upon the revue structure, in the quintessence of an all-Abbey burlesque, intensified by ‘divarsions’ and Handy Andy incidents, with the more original settings offered by Sean O’Casey. That aspect of comedy so gushly over-portrayed from Dublin artisan life, as seen only by this playwright, merely affords laborious bowing on one-string fiddle – and ‘Fluther’ Good’s is just the successor of Captain Boyle’s more lively ragtime. […] If, as a sincere artist, Mr O’Casey interpreted the raw life he is supposed to know, the sure strokes of a great dramatist would have painted such a picture of the Dublin underworld that instead of driving some to demolish the theatre, they would be driven out in horror to abolish the slum.⁴⁸⁴

The spirit of Higgins’s critique and its relationship to comic mediation can be brought to bear upon McDonagh’s portrayal of Galway life specifically in terms of the theatricalization of social problems including: domestic violence; religious disillusionment; sibling rivalry; emotional and intellectual under-development.

The plot structure of The Lonesome West is in many ways driven by the traumatic consequences of domestic violence inasmuch as most of the play deals with the fallout subsequent to Coleman’s act of patricide and its effect on the two brothers, which Valene explains here to Welsh:

Didn’t dad make a jibe about Coleman’s hairstyle, and didn’t Coleman dash out, pull him back be the hair and blow the poor skulleen out his head, the same as he’d been promising to do since the age of eight and da trod on his Scalectrix, broke it in two.⁴⁸⁵

The implications of years of patriarchal abuse stretching back to early childhood is evident here, but the farcical way in which the consequences of that abuse are presented serves to trivialize what was and still is a problem in Irish society. Prior to Valene’s explanation to Welsh of Coleman’s patricide, Coleman had melted all Valene’s figurines in a bowl in Valene’s new oven in a childish act of vengeance. Valene’s reaction is one of melodramatic anguish and his cartoon fury against Coleman is falteringly negotiated by an exasperated Welsh:

Welsh: Tell me you didn’t shoot your dad on purpose, Coleman. Please, now.

Valene: This isn’t about our fecking dad! This is about me fecking figurines!

Coleman: Do you see this fella’s priorities?⁴⁸⁶

Sandwiched as it is between Coleman’s childish destruction of Valene’s figurines and Valene’s hysterical reaction to his brother’s juvenile prank, the factum brutum of patricide is enveloped by tomfoolery and the cycle of domestic violence keeps on turning.

The melodrama escalates to the point where Valene threatens to shoot Coleman with the same shotgun used to kill their father. During the brothers’ tooing-and-froing to grab hold of the ‘bullets’, Welsh intervenes with perhaps the most viscerally shocking act in the entire play as he immerses his hands in the bowl containing the burning liquid until he can bear it no longer and then emits a ‘horrifying high-pitched wail lasting about ten seconds, during which Valene and Coleman stop fighting, stand, and try to help him’.⁴⁸⁷ The use of boiling liquid in a similarly horrific manner occurs earlier in the trilogy in The Beauty Queen of Leenane in the particularly grizzly scene seven, where Maureen tortures her elderly mother Mag because she has witheld important information regarding a potentially life-changing liaison between Maureen and her paramour Pato Dooley. Maureen’s demeanour during the torture is perhaps the most chilling aspect as her cold, matter-of-fact pragmatism contrasts with the searing pain her mother endures:

Maureen slowly and deliberately takes her mother’s shrivelled hand, holds it down on the burning range, and starts slowly pouring some of the hot oil over it, as Mag screams in pain and terror.⁴⁸⁸

The torture continues through the scene as Maureen ruthlessly interogates Mag until she gets the information she wants and prepares to leave her mother presumably to die on the floor as Maureen sets out on what she thinks will be a new life in America with Pato:

Mag: (quietly) But who’ll look after me, so?

Mag, still shaking, looks down at her scalded hand. Blackout.⁴⁸⁹

At no point during the scene is the trauma neutralized with re-assuring comic relief; Maureen behaves like an archetypal psycho-path as she calmly brutalizes her mother with the easy familiarity of someone who has (judging by the shrivelled state of Mag’s hand before the oil is poured on) done this before.

In sharp contrast to Mag’s ordeal, Father Welsh’s torment is juxtaposed with the brothers’ buffoonery through scene three in The Lonesome West. When the brothers try to calm the priest down, the mispronunciation of Welsh’s name by characters throughout the Leenane trilogy reaches its farcical apogee:

Valene: Father Walsh, now.

Coleman: Father Walsh, Father Walsh

Welsh pulls his fists out of the bowl, red raw, stifles his screams again, looks over the shocked Valene and Coleman in despair and torment, smashes the bowl off the table and dashes out through the front door, his fists clutched to his chest in pain.

Welsh: (exiting, screaming) Me name’s Welsh!!!

Valene and Coleman stare after him a moment or two.

Coleman: Sure that fella’s pure mad.

Valene: He’s outright mad.⁴⁹⁰

While this act is physically shocking on the page, the reaction to it on the stage was much less so at least in terms of the Lyric production, where the effects of Welsh’s self-immolation were sidelined by the brothers’ antics. The waves of laughter rippling through the audiences at every performance I attended, both before and during the event, served to wash away the traumatic effects of the horrifying spectacle. Indeed the audiences continued laughing as Welsh dashed off the stage screaming in agony, and a fresh wave of laughter greeted the brothers’ dim-witted reaction to Welsh’s masochism.

The 1990s witnessed a plethora of scandals each of which successively rocked the Catholic Church in Ireland: in 1992 Eamon Casey, the Bishop of Galway, was revealed as the father of a teenage boy; in 1994 a Dublin priest died in a gay sauna, while in the same year Father Brendan Smyth’s litany of paedophilia came to the fore. In 1995 the hypocrisy of the country’s best-known priest, Fr Michael Cleary, was exposed after his death. He had used his own radio show and newspaper column to espouse his extreme conservatism in relation to celibacy and matters of sexual morality, and was now revealed to have had a child with his live-in house-keeper.⁴⁹¹

In this context, McDonagh’s 1997 portrayal of Father Welsh is all the more resonant, but the exaggerated portrayal of Welsh is typical of the media representation of the priesthood at the time. As Diarmaid Ferriter explains, the media occasionally went overboard, to the extent that one newspaper in reviewing the year 1997 referred to it as the ‘the year of the paedophile priest,’ narrowing the scope of a discussion and reflection that needed to go much further than that.⁴⁹²

Such ‘narrowing’ is manifest in the play in terms of the two-dimensional approach to the traumatic issue of paedophilia in the Irish Catholic Church and is typified in this instance:

Welsh: I’m a terrible priest, so I am. I can never be defending God when people go saying things agin him, and, sure, isn’t that the main qualification for being a priest?

Coleman: Ah there be a lot worse priests than you, Father, I’m sure. The only thing with you is you’re a bit too weedy and you’re a terror for the drink and you have doubts about Catholicism. Apart from that you’re a fine priest. Number one you don’t go abusing five-year-olds so, sure, doesn’t that give you a head-start over half the priests in Ireland?⁴⁹³

The Lyric audience response at each performance I saw was a cacophony of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and uncertain laughter at the severity and irreverence, which turned into general jollity when Welsh responds:

That’s no comfort at all, and them figures are over-exaggerated anyways. I’m a terrible priest, and I run a terrible parish, and that’s the end of the matter. Two murderers I have on me books, and I can’t get either of the beggars to confess to it. About betting on the horses and impure thoughts is all them bastards ever confess.⁴⁹⁴

The quick undermining of such a serious and complex issue as paedophilia with the mundane naughtiness of Welsh’s flock is typical of McDonagh’s bathetic style in which anything and anyone are fair game.

The problem with such radical iconoclasm in the classical sense of the term is that in the final analysis we are left, like Valene at the end of the play when Coleman has destroyed his replacement figurines in another childish act of vengenace, standing in the wreckage of broken icons, with nothing and no one left to believe in. The precedent for sacrilegious destruction is established in McDonagh’s earlier play A Skull in Connemara in scene seven where Mick Dowd has been driven to the brink of despair in the discovery that his dead wife’s remains have been violated by the corrupt Garda officer Thomas Hanlon. In a surreal parody of the existential crisis of the graveyard scene in Hamlet, the drunken gravedigger Mick retrieves the relics peculiar to his profession and ‘brings the mallet crashing down on the skull nearest to him, shattering it, spraying pieces of it all over the room’.⁴⁹⁵ What starts out as a moment of surrealism tinged with more than a tint of alcohol fuelled anguish, quickly descends into farcical clowning as Mick and young Mairtin start smashing skulls and bones with wild abandon as:

Mairtin takes a little run-up and starts smashing another of the skulls and its bones to pieces. The smashing continues more or less unabated by at least one of the men throughout most of the rest of the scene.⁴⁹⁶

Such desecration recurs in The Lonesome West when Coleman experiences a momentary lapse of reason in his fury at Valene and

holding the shotgun by the barrel, starts smashing it violently into the figurines, shattering them to pieces and sending them flying around the room until not a single one remains standing. Valene screams throughout. After Coleman has finished he sits again, the gun across his lap. Valene is still kneeling.⁴⁹⁷

While the trauma felt by the various protagonists in both plays is quite palpable, it is simultaneously rendered farcical by the slapstick quality inherent to such grotesque antics. While the moral vacuity in this scene may be symptomatic of the late postmodern condition, its bleakness is untenable and for Welsh it is unlivable as he decides to take his own life in order to shock the two brothers into an act of profound self-reflection. Welsh’s dictation of his suicide letter received a round of applause at all the performances that I attended, and it is indeed the only redeeming feature in a play where the characters are at various stages on the road to perdition. However the applause seemed more in admiration of Enda Kilroy’s sustained delivery of Welsh’s monologue, with excellent diction at a whip-cracking pace, than for the sincerity of the speech’s emotional content and the brute fact of Welsh’s supreme sacrifice in his effort to redeem the wayward brothers.

When the brothers engage in a short-lived process of re-conciliation inspired by Welsh’s suicide note, the years of accumulated spite born of sibling rivalry explodes in a highly theatricalized chain reaction of cathartic exchanges. A typical exchange involves this evocation of childhood malice:

Valene: Half me childhood you spent stepping on me head, and for no reason. And d’you remember when you pinned me down and sat across me on me birthday and let the stringy spit dribble out your gob and let down and down it dribble ‘til it landed in me eye then?

Coleman: I remember it well, Valene, and I’ll tell you this. I did mean to suck that spit back up just before it got to your eye, but what happened I lost control o’er it.⁴⁹⁸

The manner in which these lines were delivered in the Lyric production served to enhance the childish quality of the language, insofar as the brothers’ posture was sufficiently juvenile and their tone of voice manifested the whiny consistency of pre-pubescent school boys. When combined with the repellent image of dripping saliva, which made many in the audience moan and squirm with muted disgust before laughing uncomfortably, the overall effect served to nullify the distressing content of the exchange by conflating fraternal abuse with boyish silliness.

The cathartic exchange designed to purge the bitterness of sibling rivalry quickly descends into a heartless game of attrition:

Valene: This is a great oul game, this is, apologizing. Father Welsh wasn’t too far wrong.

Coleman: I hope Father Welsh isn’t in hell at all. I hope he’s in heaven.⁴⁹⁹

Matters escalate in the penultimate exchange when Valene describes how he thwarted a potential liaison between Coleman and his childhood sweetheart:

Valene: D’you remember when Alison O’Hoolihan went sucking that pencil in the playground that time, and ye were to go dancing the next day, but somebody nudged that pencil and it got stuck in her tonsils on her, and be the time she got out of hospital she was engaged to the doctor who wrenched it out for her and wouldn’t be giving you a fecking sniffeen. Do you remember, now?

Coleman: I do remember.

Valene: That was me nudged that pencil, and it wasn’t an accident at all. Pure jealous I was.

Pause.

Coleman throws his sausage rolls in Valene’s face and dives over the table for his neck. Valene dodges the attack.⁵⁰⁰

When Coleman manages to control his rage, then his sorrow and palpable sense of loss become abundantly clear: ‘I did fecking love Alison O’Hoolihan! We may’ve been married today if it hadn’t been for that fecking pencil!’⁵⁰¹ Valene’s heartless dismissal of his brother’s feelings and inability to show remorse or any real sense of guilt is rendered in such a facile way that it makes a mockery of his brother’s pain: ‘That pencil is water under a bridge and I’ve apologized whole-hearted for that pencil. (Sits down.) And she had boss-eyes anyways.’⁵⁰² The quick-fire rate of delivery served to heighten the comedy for the Lyric audiences, insofar as Coleman’s rage seemed like melodramatic histrionics and Valene’s remorselessness rendered the exchange as a childish squabble instead of an adult discussion about emotional scarification.

The sibling rivalry and fraternal abuse are themselves related to the brothers’ emotional and intellectual underdevelopment. A particularly problematic instance of this is their description of Africans and Asians respectively as ‘Darkies’ and ‘Paki-men’, terms that are childishly racist and serve to render the brothers as ignorant brutes who are unaware of the shift in language consequent to the civil rights movements which led to political correctness. It is interesting that the childish language which the brothers use seemed to mediate the inherent racism of the terms, insofar as the audiences laughed off the effects as easily as they laughed at Girleen’s bawdy language or Welsh’s self-immolation. The way in which Valene describes ‘Paki-men, same as whistle at the snakes’⁵⁰³ evokes the sentiments of a bygone age, before the new phenomenon of immigration presented challenges to how Irish people perceived different races within their own national borders. As Ferriter notes:

The writer John Ardagh, who compiled his book Ireland and the Irish in the early 1990s, remarked: ‘if Asiatics or Africans were ever to arrive in some numbers, would the Irish remain so tolerant?’ Judging by the racism evident in Ireland by the end of the 1990s, the answer was a resounding no.⁵⁰⁴

In this context McDonagh’s use of such childish racism is ethically spurious as it serves to render the brothers as backward buffoons in a theatrical formula overstuffed with swaggering, postmodern mischief. Another example of this kind of overblown pastiche is the discussion of the Bosnian amputee:

Valene: There’s a lad here in Bosnia and not only has he no arms but his mammy’s just died. (Mumbles as he reads, then:) Ah they’re only after fecking money, the same as ever.

Coleman: And no fear of you sending that poor no-armed boy any money, ah no.

Valene: They’ve probably only got him to put his arms behind his back, just to cod ya.

Coleman: It’s any excuse for you.

Valene: And I bet his mammy’s fine.⁵⁰⁵

The effect of Valene’s cynicism on the Lyric audiences was variously: bemusement; sniggering; nervous amusement; and guilty yet fairly raucous laughter. The sheer nihilism of this exchange in terms of any underlying message which might justify Valene’s heartlessness stands in stark contrast to the impact that the Bosnian civil war had on McDonagh’s contemporary Sarah Kane, whose play Blasted deliberately attempted to drive the horror of civil war into the minds of theatregoers in Britain.⁵⁰⁶ Kane clearly states that:

I think with Blasted that it was a direct response to material as it began to happen […] I switched on the news one night while I was having a break from writing, and there was a very old woman’s face in Srebrenica just weeping and looking into the camera and saying – ‘please, please, somebody help us, because we need the UN to come here and help us.’ I thought this is absolutely terrible […]⁵⁰⁷

It is this political commitment which ultimately justifies all the brutality and shock tactics that are used in Blasted to get Kane’s message across that ‘the seeds of full-scale war can always be found in peace-time civilization’.⁵⁰⁸ In McDonagh’s The Lonesome West there is no such justification for the brutality, viciousness and cynicism. While one could argue that in postmodern aesthetics there does not have to be a justification, that the ‘message’ is a matter of interpretation, what we are left with in this case is the autotelic use of brutality for no reason other than audience titillation through the comic mediation of pain and destruction.

This raises difficult ethical questions about not only the production but also the reception of McDonagh’s plays. Regarding the UK reception, Time magazine reported that in 1997 McDonagh was ‘the only writer this season, apart from Shakespeare, to have four plays running concurrently in London’.⁵⁰⁹ In terms of the USA reception, the 1998 Broadway production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane won four Tony awards. Apropos the Northern Ireland reception, the 2005 Lyric/An Grianán production of The Lonesome West enjoyed both popular success and critical acclaim. The problem then is not only the ethical dimension of the plays in and of themselves, but also the ethical dimension of the audience response. The plays in the Leenane trilogy, particularly The Lonesome West, are in the final analysis based on the manipulation of the dark side of emotional arousal and the farcical re-presentation of fundamentally traumatic events. The reception of McDonagh’s plays is thrown into relief by the fact that the 2001 Broadway production of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, which won a record breaking twelve Tony awards, featured a play-within-a-play called ‘Spring-time for Hitler’ that had at its centre-piece Nazi showgirls dancing in the formation of a swastika which could be seen reflected in a mirror situated directly above the stage. The problem with both McDonagh’s The Lonesome West and Brooks’s The Producers is the overblown, postmodern playfulness where irony folds back on itself to ultimately sustain the very ideology it is supposed to subvert.

The counter-argument that the creator of The Producers is Jewish and is quite obviously being blatantly, extravagantly tongue-in-cheek in his portrayal of Nazi Germany would surely make Theodor Adorno turn in his grave. It seems we live in a time where Adorno’s statement ‘that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’⁵¹⁰ has been so warped by the cultural logic of late capitalism, that postmodern irony has become a hall of mirrors where ethical value is more a matter of clever refraction than critical reflection. As Adorno said of Schoenberg’s Survivor of Warsaw: ‘The so-called aristic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, how-ever remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it.’⁵¹¹ It follows that McDonagh’s postmodern Stage Irishry with its comic mediation of pain and suffering, its titillation of spiteful, cynical emotions not only sells but must, judging by the popular success of his Leenane trilogy, ‘elicit enjoyment’ for the majority of audience members who saw it. The Stage Irishry that made Dion Boucicault several fortunes and sealed Sean O’Casey’s place in the world theatrical canon has, with a bit of cleverness and a lot of cynicism, done both for McDonagh. The message, if there is one, seems to be: the Stage Irish are dead, long live the Stage Irish.

Extract From: The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: ‘A World of Savage Stories’, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (2006)

Cross Reference: Garry Hynes, Druid Theatre

See Also: Because we are poor: Irish theatre in the 1990s, by Victor Merriman