Well, ladies and gentlemen, today we are starting our Irish unit, which will probably go on for the next several months. Joyously, just as I was beginning to fall into the depths of despair, I have finally been cast in something, and that something is Brian Friel’s Translations. Whee! In gratitude, and out of my own natural nerdiness and curiosity about my heritage, I have decided to do some investigation of the literature and history of the Emerald Isle. And this began with the reading of three plays by a playwright I ought to have already known (post B.F.A.) but had never read or seen anything by, the unmatchable Martin McDonagh.
I knew he had a reputation for being both brutal and dark, and as I tend to favor the Sarah Ruhl school of lyrical, optimistic drama, I approached the Galway trilogy (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West) with some trepidation. The back cover of the book describes the town of Leenane, where all three plays are set, as “so blighted by rancor, ignorance and spite that, as the local priest complains, God himself seems to have no jurisdiction there.” The three plays each feature four characters, none of whom appear in more than one play but several of whom are mentioned in plays in which they do not appear, which not only links the three together but contributes to the sense of a tiny town where everyone knows everything about everyone, and most of them hold grudges for decades. To my surprise, I found all three plays compelling, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking, and although they each stand alone, the experience of reading all three one after the other contributed greatly to my enjoyment and my understanding of Leenane.
McDonagh’s characters do terrible things to their family members, but somehow (especially in Lonesome West, which I think was my favorite) he makes their quarrels blackly funny; I never feel with him, as I do with some authors, that he’s indifferent to the loss of his characters’ lives or even to the gloom of lives warped by selfishness and loneliness. Have you ever felt that? That a writer (or movie director) is killing someone off or making someone miserable for effect or for a moral, without really weighing the cost of a human life, and you think, hey! You can’t do that! I’m not buying that! It needs to mean more! McDonagh, on the other hand, without taking his characters’ pain lightly, allows them to express it in hilariously human, petty ways (until they give in and murder each other); the complacency and indifference with which most of the town regards their crimes is absurd, almost farcical, and McDonagh allows himself some great self-referential moments to the insanity of it all. It was fun, in The Lonesome West, to finally meet the ineffective local priest, Father Welsh, whose name no one can quite remember and whose attempt to maintain some optimism about the souls of his parish is gradually worn down by alcohol and the unnatural deaths of several parishioners. Father Welsh is a wonderful character because he, almost alone of anyone, is aware of the awfulness of life in this town, the horrors of people murdering their mothers and fathers and wives, and his flabbergasted protestations that this is altogether unacceptable are both comical and the voice of reason in a mad world.
Maybe McDonagh is simply following the old secret of comedy (and tragedy)—he takes an ordinary human condition (being unable to stand your neighbors and relatives) and pushes it to the furthest possible extreme. Because you recognize and believe the scenes of the mother nagging her daughter about buying the wrong cookies and the brothers fighting about toys they stole from one another as children, it’s an easier leap than one might expect to believing they might blackmail one another for their inheritance money or bash one another’s head in with a fire poker. Without judging his characters or condescending to them, McDonagh never descends to heir level of their ignorance and cynicism. It takes a deft hand for a playwright to express more with his work than what his characters say, without making them unlikable martinets, and McDonagh does it skillfully and entertainingly.
As with the Shakespeare plays I’ve already written about, there are so many moments and lines I’d like to copy out for you, things that made me laugh or stuck in my head or haunted me a little. But one thing I am slowly learning (after years of compulsive quote-copying into my notebook) is that at a certain point, what you’re really trying to do is copy the whole book, and you can’t do that. At that point, just go back and read it again. So, dear readers, I would like to urge you to go out and read these plays yourself, if you haven’t already. I can promise you’ll be entertained—I have a weak stomach for violence and darkness, so if I found McDonagh not only palatable but hilarious, chances are so will you.
P.S. More on Translations soon!
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