Introduction

In 1994, an unemployed young London-born man of Irish descent, Martin McDonagh, wrote the drafts of seven plays in nine months, the entirety of his dramatic corpus to date (O’Toole, “A Mind in Connemara” 44). While he has insisted that he will never write another play, that remains to be seen, and the existing plays offer a series of challenges to traditional theatrical expectations-in Ireland and abroad. McDonagh’s dramas refuse to conform to any lingering stereotypical notions of Irish identity as bucolic or nationalistic. In his rise to fame, however, he has deliberately courted another Irish stereotype-the pugnacious, drunken “Paddy”—most notably when he told Sean Connery to “fuck off” after Connery warned him and his brother John McDonagh to be quiet during the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards ceremony in November 1996, a ceremony at which McDonagh received the Most Promising Playwright Prize (O’Toole, “A Mind in Connemara” 45). One is reminded of Brendan Behan’s drunken, bumbling interview on the BBC Panorama program with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1956. Although Behan did not even curse and mumbled many of his answers, he quickly helped make the incident an anarchist critique of the staid London establishment. McDonagh has more explicitly claimed to endorse such a viewpoint, telling Fintan O’Toole in interview that his rejection of the cult of sentimentality for dead “martyrs” of the Irish Republican Army in the 1970s and 1980s was based on his immersion in punk rock music such as the Sex Pistols and the Pogues: “I was always coming from a left-wing or pacifist or anarchist angle that started with punk, and which was against all nationalisms” (O’Toole, “A Mind in Connemara” 42).1