Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh (born March 26, 1970, London, England) British-Irish playwright and filmmaker whose work blends vibrant dialogue, exceptionally dark humor, and violence. His notable plays include The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), and The Pillowman (2003). He wrote and directed the feature-length films In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).

Early life

McDonagh is the younger of two sons born to Irish parents in London. His father was a construction worker, and his mother worked as a housekeeper. In London, McDonagh and his elder brother, John Michael McDonagh, attended Roman Catholic schools, where most of the students and faculty were of Irish descent. He spent many of his childhood summers with his family in the Connemara region on the west coast of Ireland, where his father was raised. In a 2006 interview with The New Yorker magazine, he recalled how the region’s rugged terrain and coastline made a lasting impression on him: “[The landscape] always stuck in my mind. Just the lunar quality, the remoteness, the wildness, the loneliness of it.” Connemara would later serve as a setting for many of McDonagh’s plays.

Among his influences growing up were the films of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, and Sergio Leone. McDonagh began to question his faith at age 12, when he started listening to his brother’s punk rock records, especially the music of the Clash and the Pogues. When he was 14, he attended his first play: a London production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo starring Al Pacino, his favorite actor. In time, he discovered the work of writers such as playwright Harold Pinter, novelist Vladimir Nabokov, and short-story writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges. McDonagh left school at age 16, with plans of becoming a writer, having been inspired by his brother, who had also left school early to pursue writing. For the next few years, McDonagh wrote a series of grotesque stories, plays, and scripts while living on public assistance or working odd jobs, such as a supermarket clerk and a part-time administrative assistant in the civil service. He sent some of his writing to film companies, but none of it was accepted. When his parents moved back to Ireland in 1992, McDonagh remained in London with his brother.

Playwriting career

In 1994, after his brother left England to attend film school in California, McDonagh used the resulting solitude to write more plays, completing seven in about 10 months. After submitting the plays to numerous theater companies, he found success with the Druid Theatre, based in Galway, Ireland. The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the first play in his Leenane Trilogy, premiered in Galway in 1996 in a coproduction by Druid and the Royal Court Theatre Company. Set in the village of Leenane in western Ireland, the play centers on the mutually cruel relationship of a lonely middle-aged woman and her manipulative mother, who thwarts her daughter’s attempts to escape from Leenane. Critics heralded its idiosyncratic dialogue, dark humor, and unsentimental view of rural Ireland. The other two plays in the Leenane Trilogy, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West, premiered the following year.

The first play in McDonagh’s Aran Islands Trilogy, The Cripple of Inishmaan, also debuted in 1996, at the National Theatre in London. Set in the 1930s, its plot springboards off the real-life filming of Robert Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran (1934), which attempted to capture the heroic deeds of the people of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. In the play, as news gets out that Flaherty is seeking locals to appear in his film, an outcast boy aims to win a part and the love of the prettiest—and meanest—girl on the island.

Due to his youth and rapid success, McDonagh became a celebrity in the theater scene. He also developed a notorious reputation that was fueled by interviews in which he derided other playwrights and by a highly publicized incident in which he exchanged insults with actor Sean Connery at the 1996 London Evening Standard Theatre Awards, at which McDonagh won an award for most promising playwright.

In 1998 The Beauty Queen of Leenane made its Broadway debut. It earned six Tony Award nominations, winning four in the acting and directing categories. McDonagh had more difficulty mounting the second play in his Aran Islands Trilogy, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. A devastating critique of fanatical patriotism and extremist paramilitary groups such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the play was rejected by theater companies out of concern for inciting violence and disrupting the peace process in Northern Ireland. It finally premiered in 2001 in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

His next play, The Pillowman, premiered in London in 2003 at the National Theatre, with actors David Tennant and Jim Broadbent in lead roles. Set in an unnamed police state, its plot involves a writer who is interrogated by police for his disturbing stories, which share similarities with a series of actual child murders. Its Broadway production in 2005, starring Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum, was nominated for six Tony Awards, including best play.

Film career

In 2004 McDonagh wrote and directed the short film Six Shooter, a dark comedy about grief that starred Brendan Gleeson. It won an Academy Award in 2006 for best live-action short film. In 2008 he wrote and directed his first feature-length film, In Bruges. Set in Bruges, Belgium, the film follows two mismatched Irish hit men (played by Gleeson and Colin Farrell) as they await orders from their crime boss (Ralph Fiennes). Filled with McDonagh’s characteristic dark humor, crackling dialogue, and violent scenarios, the film was a commercial and critical success. It earned an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay and won a BAFTA Award for best original screenplay.

In 2011 McDonagh served as an executive producer for The Guard, a dark comedy that starred Gleeson and Don Cheadle and was written and directed by McDonagh’s brother, John Michael McDonagh, who had established his own filmmaking career. The following year, McDonagh wrote and directed the film Seven Psychopaths, an ultraviolent, metafictional satire about the life of a Hollywood screenwriter. Farrell led an eclectic cast that included Abbie Cornish, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Gabourey Sidibe, Tom Waits, and Christopher Walken.

McDonagh’s next film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is a complex story of a grieving mother (played by Frances McDormand) in a small Midwestern town who demands justice from the local sheriff (Harrelson) for the murder of her daughter. Although its redemption arc concerning a racist police officer character (Rockwell) was deemed problematic by some critics, the film was lauded for its performances. McDormand and Rockwell won Academy Awards for best actress and best supporting actor, respectively. Overall, the film received seven Academy Award nominations, including nods for best film and best original screenplay.

In 2022 McDonagh wrote and directed The Banshees of Inisherin. Its title came from a play he wrote in 1994: The Banshees of Inisheer, the third play in his Aran Islands Trilogy, which was never produced onstage. Set during the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, the film centers on two men (Farrell and Gleeson) whose relationship careens into conflict after one abruptly ends their friendship without explanation. It earned nine Academy Award nominations, including for best film, directing, and original screenplay. At the BAFTAs, the film won for best British film and original screenplay; in addition, Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan won for best supporting actress and actor, respectively.

In addition to filmmaking, McDonagh has continued to write new plays. His first play set in the United States, A Behanding in Spokane, debuted on Broadway in 2010 and featured Walken and Rockwell in lead roles. Hangmen, a play about the abolition of hanging in Britain in the 1960s, premiered in London in 2015 and won the Laurence Olivier Award for best new play. A Very Very Very Dark Matter, about colonialism and the whitewashing of fairy tales, debuted in London in 2018. In 2022 Hangmen premiered on Broadway and earned five Tony nominations, including a nod for best play.