Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson
2005; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 35; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2222-4289
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoIt has been an extraordinary double phenomenon, the nearly simultaneous rise and rise of Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson. McDonagh's first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was produced by Druid Theatre Company in association with the Royal Court in 1996 when the author was twenty-five. It swept up a string of London prizes--Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer, Writers' Guild Award for Best Fringe Theatre Play, George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright--before eventually going on to do equally well with Tony awards when it transferred to New York. McPherson was born in 1971, the very same year as McDonagh, but by the time The Weir followed The Beauty Queen of Leenane into the Royal Court in 1997, it was already his fifth professionally produced play. The Weir was very nearly as successful as Beauty Queen, with its share of prizes (including a couple that McDonagh had won the year before), a long run in London, and an international tour. In the event, neither playwright has proved to be a one-hit wonder. Beauty Queen was followed by two more plays making up the Leenane Trilogy--A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West, both produced in 1997--and with the production of The Cripple of Inishmaan by the National Theatre in the same year, McDonagh was touted as the first playwright since Shakespeare to have four plays running in London at the same time. (1) Though there was a hiatus before the staging of the second of his Aran trilogy, The Lieutenant of Inishmore by the RSC in 2001, due to the very controversial nature of its subject, it too transferred successfully to the West End. McDonagh's work has been staged all over the world in English and in translation; it has been claimed that by 2000 he was more produced in the US than any other dramatist but Shakespeare. (2) Neither of McPherson's two full-length plays since The Weir, Dublin Carol (2000) and Port Authority (2001), though critically warmly received, has had the scale of commercial success of The Weir. But McPherson has made himself an additional double career as theatre director and film-maker, directing his own and other playwrights' plays, and making three feature films: I Went Down (1997) as screenwriter, the prizewinning Saltwater (2001), adapted from his own stage play This Lime Tree Bower, and The Actors (2003), both as screenwriter and director. And McPherson, like McDonagh, continues to have his plays regularly revived. The twinned successes of the two young Irish playwrights, so utterly different in style, temperament, and attitude, has been the subject of endless media stories. Theatre critics have tended to prefer one or the other, some regarding McDonagh as brash and heartless, some accusing McPherson of lacking dramatic edge. Both have been quickly assimilated into the heritage of Irish theatre stretching back to Synge and O'Casey, in spite of McDonagh's claims that he had never read Synge before he wrote Beauty Queen, and McPherson's uneasiness at being labelled an 'Irish' playwright. (3) What is most interesting in McDonagh and McPherson's work is the contrasting versions of Ireland the plays dramatize and the varieties of the Irish imaginary reflected in their reception. The special category of the Irish play conditions the context in which their plays are staged, however little the dramatists themselves may like it. They speak to already formed Irelands of the mind. The aim of this essay is to explore Beauty Queen and The Weir as late-twentieth-century interventions in the history of Irish self-representation. I. Views from the City Romantic pastoral was a formative part of the Literary Revival from the beginning: urban writers rejecting metropolitan life ('Give up Paris', Yeats told Synge, 'Go to the Aran Islands'), renewing themselves 'Antaeus-like' by contact with the soil, by escape into the otherness of the West. Even Joyce, most defiantly city-oriented, could at least toy with the idea in 'The Dead' that it was time to set out on the journey westward. …
Referência(s)