"The Laughter Will Come of Itself. The Tears Are Inevitable": Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism

"The Laughter Will Come of Itself. The Tears Are Inevitable": Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism1 PATRICK LONERGAN INTRODUCTION: THE MCDONAGH ENIGMA At the 2003 arumal conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures,2 a special panel discussed the works of Martin McDonagh . The event was-well attended, and the papers presented in it were of the highest quality, yet there was an umnistakable sense of frustration and weariness in the debate that ensued - one participant even proposed that, owing to the impossibility of gaining agreement on the quality, authenticity, or importance of McDonagh's work, no further discussion of it should take place until his oeuvre had developed sufficiently to allow for greater critical consensus. Such frustration has been evident in discussions about McDonagh since shortly after The Beauty Queen ofLeenane premiered in Galway in 1996, with opinion about his work usually falling into one of two apparently irreconcilable extremes: the belief that McDonagh is cleverly subverting stereotypes of the Irish, and the conviction that, on the contrary, he is exploiting those stereotypes , earning a great deal of money by making the Irish look like a nation of morons. Discussing the literature on this subject, John Waters neatly frames this polarization as involving a clash between those who think that McDonagh 's work represents "the search for truth" and those who state that it instead serves "the appetite for delusion" (54). Any review of these debates will quickly show why discoursc about McDonagh appears to have become exhausted: there is strong evidence to support both sides of the argument. Those who believe that McDonagh's plays facilitate a search for truth might point to Irish audiences' enthusiastic responses to the original Druid Theatre-Royal Court co-production of The Leenane Trilogy (1997). There are many ways of explaining that enthusiasm. The plays can be seen in the context of the Irish comic tradition of absurdism combined with gallows humour - a striking feature of the novels of Flann O'Brien and the drama of Samuel Modem Drama, 47:4 (Winter 2004) 636 Martin McDonagh, Globalization, and Irish Theatre Criticism 637 Beckett, and an important presence throughout Irish literature, as discussed by Vivian Mercier. Furthennore, they cover thematic ground very familiar to Irish audiences: their treatment of emigration, for example, locates them finuly in the tradition of such plays as Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) or Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming (1985). However, the plays' popularity may best be explained by the way in which they allowed Irish audiences to confront many of the changes that occurred during the "Celtic Tiger" period of economic prosperity and social transformation in Ireland, which lasted from approximately 1993 to 2001. Each play in The Leenane Trilogy represents one of the major authorities in Irish life The Beauty Queen of Lee/wne deals with the family, A Skull in Connemara with die law, and The Lonesome West with the church - at a time when the power of those authorities in Ireland was being eroded by revelations about political corruption, child abuse, and institutional incompetence. It is unlikely that any member of McDonagh's audience in Ireland would have mistaken his representations of the country as accurate or authentic, but the popularity of The Leenane Trilogy can be understood in tenus of its skewed representation of these - and many other - uncomfortable truths to Irish audiences. The plays presented the music of Dana as if it were irrelevant Irish kitsch two years before the singer became a Member of the European Parliament for a constituency that includes the real-life town of Leenane and the Aran Islands, where all of McDonagh's Irish plays are set. They presented familial murder in a pseudo-gothic style at a time when the Irish media were dubbing Catherine Nevin a "black widow" during her trial for the murder of her husband in March 1996 (O'Connor). The plays' dramatic power was based on the revelation of deeply buried secrets - something they had in common with the tribunals established by the Irish government throughout the 1990S to dig into the pasts of some of Ireland's most prominent politicians. A Skull...