ABSTRACT
Ireland’s most celebrated playwrights-Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Casey, and John Millington Synge-have all delighted in creating laughter in darkness and finding humor in the pain and torture of living. In their comedy, laughter is never very far from tears. Much of contemporary Irish drama seems to follow this same tradition of using comedy to explore the darker side of the human experience. This is certainly true of the plays of Martin McDonagh, the most celebrated Irish playwright of the last decade. “I walk that line between comedy and cruelty,” McDonagh declares, “because I think one illuminates the other”:
And yeah, I tend to push things as far as I can because I think you can see things more clearly through exaggeration than through reality. It’s like a John Woo or a Tarantino scene, where the characters are doing awful things and, simultaneously, talking about everyday things in a really humorous way. There is a humour in there that is straight-ahead funny and uncomfortable. It makes you laugh and think. (quoted in O’Hagan 24)
More than any other contemporary playwright, McDonagh has brought Irish comedy back to the forefront of public attention. His plays-which feature a unique fusion of macabre humor, Tarantino-style violence, and postmodern themes-have garnered a great deal of critical acclaim while at the same time they have bewildered the theater community. Critics differ in their assessment of his work, and scholars are unsure of where to place him in the grand tradition of Irish theater. Most agree that McDonagh is a gifted writer and craftsman whose strength lies in his ability to confound audience expectations and to breathe new life into previously outmoded theatrical conventions.
