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  • “Life Just Is Like That”: Martin McDonagh’s Estonian Enigma
  • Kersti Tarien Powell

Martin McDonagh’s Leenane trilogy, comprising The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), A Skull in Connemara (1997), and The Lonesome West (1997), has met with almost universal acclaim. The young Irish émigré’s depiction of Irishness in a fictional Leenane has been successfully produced on London, Dublin, and Broadway stages, while scholars and critics have been trying to dissect the “McDonagh enigma.” John Waters encapsulated the problematic intricacies of this enigma, saying that McDonagh is “like Synge, a creative tourist, a visiting dilettante, an intimate outsider.”1 McDonagh himself, the chiefly Irish-centered plays, and the intriguingly hyphenated Irish-Englishness of his own personal background have each provided critics with abundant problems—the most prominent of which is his problematic representation of Ireland. His plays seem to engage with what have been seen as “constitutive themes of Irish culture.”2 Corruption in the Catholic church and religious disillusionment, family violence, miscommunication and loneliness, the obsessive intrusion and lack of privacy in a small rural community—all these have been declared endemic to Irish culture and society at one time or another. According to Waters, McDonagh’s plays

speak to an audience in a knowing way about the things that audiences, being expectant of watching an Irish play in a long line of Irish plays, expects to experience. McDonagh’s plays emerge from the same vague source as Synge’s, Friel’s, Murphy’s and Keane’s, and seem to “know” all these with an immense sense of irony and varying degrees of respect.3 [End Page 138]

Waters not only places McDonagh in a long line of representative Irish playwrights; he also claims that his plays only “speak” to an audience aware of its cultural lineage or, in other words, its Irishness. Shaun Richards has taken this claim even further, arguing that McDonagh’s intertextual indebtedness to Synge and O’Casey should be seen as a decisive element of the theatergoers’ admittance to his Leenane.4

However, McDonagh’s plays have also turned into global commodities, successfully translated and transported onto many stages around the world. Patrick Lonergan in particular has sought to analyze McDonagh in the global context.5 He has argued that McDonagh’s work should be seen “not as local or national . . . but instead as functioning according to a globalized cultural model.”6 In this model, McDonagh’s work shares some similarities with the 1990s cinema—particularly the films of Danny Boyle and Quentin Tarantino—and with the soap opera genre; all possess an “ability to travel across international boundaries with ease, despite their use of regional or marginal idioms, settings, and forms.”7 McDonagh’s phenomenon is enigmatic indeed, as can be seen from these divergent views of his plays and their place in a theatrical—national or global—tradition. Yet, examining the translation of his plays and their reception in order to determine what is actually transmitted in an act of global cultural exchange sheds light not only onto the audience and its ability to receive McDonagh’s “Irishness,” but also on the inherent qualities of his drama. Here, the small northern European country of Estonia becomes an interesting case study.

Estonia shares many similarities with Ireland and the Irish experience. Each has historically been a country controlled and absorbed by a powerful neighbor; more recently, each exemplifies a successful “tiger economy” that must now grapple with the effects of global recession and its repercussions. At the same time, the Irish cultural context that Waters and Richards consider so essential for understanding McDonagh remains relatively unknown in Estonia. McDonagh’s success in Estonia does not owe so much to soap operas or to Tarantino’s movies as it does to the rather confusing “realism” of his plays. For Estonians, [End Page 139] the realisam of the plays resides in their engagement with such thematic focal points as lost love, emigration, and life in a newly rich capitalist environment. If McDonagh subverts stereotypical modern Irish reality, then it is life itself that is frighteningly similar both in Leenane and Estonia.

The Irish example is very much current in Estonia. Having re-established its...

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