ABSTRACT

Martin McDonagh’s playwriting aesthetic is to disrupt the dramatic status quo, usually relying on violence and shocking deaths as a gateway into challenging the state of the theatre and its audience. McDonagh has chalked up the delay to the play’s politics involving the Irish Republican Army and a fear that the play’s production might have caused difficulty for the peace negotiations that were taking place. McDonagh has written and directed four films: Six Shooter, In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Film allows McDonagh to use death with far more reaching correlations to character arc and narrative cohesiveness. In Bruges offers a wide tapestry of death imagery, narrative and representative, which powerfully deepens the audience’s understanding of the characters and the entire film, showing that when it comes to death, McDonagh is a showman of violence on the stage, and a contemplative explorer of death on the screen.