His Cruel Imaginings
breakfast with the bard of black comedy

All Credit To: Independent.ie
By: Barry Egan
Date: 7 September 2008

He says he's happy-go-lucky, he had an ordinary childhood and the closest he's been to death was when his cat died. So where does Martin McDonagh get the macabre ideas that make his plays so memorable? On the eve of a national tour of 'The Cripple of Inishmann', Ireland's top dramatist talks to Barry Egan.

Breakfast with the bard of black comedy. He looks like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Then you realise the poison that has seeped from the pen of Martin McDonagh...

In The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Maureen holds the trembling hands of her mother Mag and pours boiling oil over them. Mag is later beaten to a deathly pulp with a poker. In The Lonesome West, Coleman kills his oul' fella for making a joke of his gruaige: "There's some insults that can never be excused," is Coleman's rationale. Then there are the gentle tales of girls being force-fed apples with razor blades in them or boys bleeding to death from having their tootsies cut off in The Pillowman.

Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of the National Theatre in London, once said that "the Martin I know is quiet, genial, funny, courteous, extremely easy to get on with. That cruel imagination is an interior affair." Nicholas, who staged the first production of The Cripple of Inishmaan in 1997, added: "It comes from somewhere that's not accessible to anyone else."

I ask McDonagh where that 'somewhere else' is.

"I don't know, but I probably disagree that it is a 'cruel imagination'," he says over brekkie in the Radisson last week. "I see more of a balance, but from the outside ... "

If I held your hand and poured boiling oil on top of it, would I have a cruel imagination?

The greatest playwright of his generation cackles like one of Shakespeare's witches at the question. "But it's fiction!" McDonagh laughs. "[To pour boiling oil on my hand] would be mean of you in real life. As well as it being a cruel moment it is also a strongly visual one and it is a plot pay-off. It is five things in one."

Garry Hynes, the director of the Druid Theatre, told Fintan O'Toole in a New Yorker magazine interview that in the spring of 1995, she was "sitting down one night after dinner at home with the script of A Skull in Connemara. As soon as I read the dialogue I wanted to hear it, to the degree that I started reading it aloud to myself. I very clearly remember reading it aloud and throwing myself on the floor in paroxysms of laughter." It could be argued that McDonagh has kept his audience in paroxysms of laughter in theatres from Tokyo to New York ever since.

Born in Camberwell in London, Martin spent most summers with his parents and older brother John in Connemara (his mother is from Sligo, his father from Connemara). He drew on what he saw and heard around the west during those summer hols. "It would always be the west," he says. "Dublin was always the place to get through -- to get to the interesting places as a kid.

"So it was never a journey to discover something. I wrote them all while in London but the voices are all Irish in my head," he adds.

I say that as a boy in Dublin, my mother threatened to send me to Connemara for the summer if I wasn't good.

"My mother would threaten Irish dancing classes," he laughs.

Michael Flatley's loss is the theatre world's gain, of course. "In 1997," wrote Fintan O'Toole, "McDonagh was widely described as the first dramatist since Shakespeare to have four works professionally produced on the London stage in a single season." It is extraordinary that Martin is only 38 now. His imagination to write at such an early age came from, he believes, being on the social welfare in London "and not wanting to be poor". He was working part-time in the Department of Trade and Industry, but quit the civil service to go on the dole and to write.

The freedom of not having a nine-to-five job fuelled his ambition to "create something" or at least "do something well".

As a young man growing up in London, McDonagh was by his own admission "pretty shy, quiet -- not overly intelligent, not overly stupid". To write so much at a young age, he says, "you have to be dedicated, you have to care. But I didn't really have anything else going on in my life. I didn't really have a girlfriend or didn't know how you got one -- apart from being a famous writer, so maybe that was the motivation," he laughs.

And did it get you girls?

"Well," he says, "it got me out of the house."

You sound like a character from a Woody Allen film.

"It was not quite that bad," he laughs. "At the time I was basically just staying in and signing on every couple of weeks. This was just before they brought in legislation where you couldn't quit a job and draw the dole any more."

He says a lot of his humour came from listening to the punk bands of his era like The Clash and then a group of London-Irish roues fronted by Shane MacGowan, who made him realise, he says, that Irish culture wasn't all diddley-eye and crass, and could have a punk-ish and iconoclastic sensibility too.

The young McDonagh wanted to bring theatre back to well-told storytelling which operated on many levels. The "over-dramatic" characters are a combination of pure imagination and what he observed: "uncles around Connemara had stories", Martin recalls, "and knew bits and pieces."

With his plays, McDonagh takes real things and adds his rich imagination to them. And there are a lot of real things in his work to fascinate. When asked if the brothers fighting in The Lonesome West were him and his own brother John, McDonagh says: "At the time I didn't think it was, but lots of people said afterwards that that was exactly me and him. We fought a lot. We still do. We love each other very much. There's always a nice sort of tension. So it was partly that and partly, you know, other uncles."

And did the character in The Lonesome West who smashes the 150 figurines of a saint every night in his house actually exist?

"As a six-year-old from London coming to a house with myriad statues of the Virgin Mary seemed quite strange to me. It always stood out. So, yeah, that was taken literally from an actual place. There would be 150 statues smashed up each night [in the play]. It was a character thing. The guy was a complete miser. Because he thought they would get him into heaven or something. It was also a kind of punk ending to a play: to destroy your instruments."

In the past, he says, relations offered him "access to a West of Ireland sensibility". He is not, however, "doing quite so much West of Ireland stuff now. In Bruges", (he says, referring to his recent movie with Messrs Farrell, Gleason and Fiennes) "was more modern and was Dublin-esque. There was a Dublin side to Irish writing that I hadn't really explored before."

McDonagh has been in Dublin for a few weeks in rehearsals for The Cripple of Inishmann at the Abbey, which reunites him with Ms Hynes. "It has been a lot of fun," he says. "It is just a reminder of how good she is and how much fun we have working together."

There is, he says, a lot of cruel humour in it. When I ask about the difference between cruel humour and the cruel imagination that he is said to possess, McDonagh smiles and says: "It is more about the balance. Cruel in humour is not cruel. There has always been a balance of heart and humour and darkness and cruelty. So I wouldn't say these plays are dark and cruel because that's ignoring the others."

Did you pull the wings off butterflies as a child, Martin?

"No," he smiles, "but there's still time."

THE Quentin Tarantino of the Boards says he has never seen a murder or even a car crash. He used to have a cat called Pussy that died of natural causes. He says his life hasn't had any real low points that he can think of. "Both my parents are still alive. I haven't really experienced death close to me. Maybe the death of Pussy," he laughs. He describes himself as "dreamy, happy-go-lucky". As a teenager, he was "really big into" the wilfully disaffected Seattle band Nirvana. Asked if he would ever walk away if he felt he had nothing else to say in his work like his hero Kurt Cobain did -- albeit in Cobain's case by committing suicide in 1994 -- Martin smiles and says: "There has always been a big draw to quit and leave silence but you only have so much time to tell a few stories so you might as well. And it's fun. The past 10 years have been fun. So even when you're working hard, it's all good. There's no reason to leave it. I used to have romantic visions of doing a Salinger thing," he says, referring to the legendarily reclusive author of The Catcher In The Rye, "but it doesn't appeal anymore." More basic romantic visions like a wife ("Some days") and children ("maybe not so much") are there occasionally, he says. "I have a normal life really."

I don't believe him. I feel you are going out with your words.

"No, because ... "

I cut him off. How would past partners describe you?

"It would depend on the past partner, I think."

Self-absorbed?

"Yeah, probably. I think you've got to be a bit," he smiles. "You've got to have time that's yours and not theirs. When you're writing you have to have that time purely for you, I think, but most of the time I'm not writing or doing any of this, so ... " He thinks people have a misconception of him as "overly arrogant" (possibly he is talking about the time he told Sean Connery to eff off at an awards show or his punk-ish dismissal of other theatre.)

The Tarantino of the Boards lives on his own in Limehouse.

Any statues in the house you feel you should mention, Martin?

"None," he smiles, "so far."