ABSTRACT
In the theater season of 2000-2001, a Dutch and Flemish theater company collaboratively staged Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy in The Netherlands and Flanders. This production was part of a worldwide response to McDonagh’s rising reputation as a playwright, but the way in which the companies decided to stage his first trilogy elicits an unusual analysis and interpretation of it. One of the interesting features of this adaptation is the weaving of the three original parts-The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West-into one four-hour-long production. A comparative structural analysis of this adaptation can be found in my essay “Martin McDonagh’s Irishness: Icing on the Cake”? (2006). In that article, I also discuss the way in which the Dutch director, his two dramaturges, and a cast of Dutch and Flemish actors translated Irish topicality into a more universal context without doing any injustice to the play’s Irishness.
