Nicholas Grene’s “Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson”

游雁茹

摘要

        Despite their nearly simultaneous rise, Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson have totally different styles and attitudes in writing, viewing Ireland from utterly distinct perspectives, and their literary reception also reflects the contrasting versions of Ireland’s image in theatre. In “Ireland in Two Minds,” Nicholas Grene aims to investigate McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane and McPherson’s The Weir as the “late-twentieth-century interventions in the history of Irish self-representation” (299).

        Before looking into their plays, Grene firstly demonstrates in his essay how the two playwrights’ personal lives and family backgrounds have brought profound influences on their works. As a London Irish, McDonagh emigrated to England with his parents, who came from Sligo and Galway respectively, and he was forced to spend his family holidays regularly in these two counties. Such unpleasant childhood days thus brought McDonagh a repulsive image of rural Ireland, which can be plainly observed his plays. McPherson, growing up in Dublin with his urban parents, only visits his grandfather in Leitrim once in a while, has been impressed by pastoral Ireland. Such impressions about western Ireland are reproduced but critiqued in their literary productions. In Beauty Queen, McDonagh depicts the ennui of the country life, expressing his dystopic view of the small Irish town through eyes of his characters. Contrarily, what McPherson attempts to present in The Weir is an amiable micro-community in the Irish countryside, where the members are considerate and sympathetic toward one another.

        In the second section, “Archaism and Modernity,” Grene further explores the “chronological slippage” in the two plays, regarding it as an effective reflection of the “realities of the Irish socio-cultural situation” (306). Set in the 1990s, both Beauty Queen and The Weir give a portrait of the contemporary pastoral Ireland, which is situated in the margin of the modern world. The characters in the two plays either stay resistant to modernity (like the five protagonists in The Weir) or carry the “stigma” of the backward Irishness with them (like Maureen’s mental breakdown in Beauty Queen.) Although such a “chronological slippage” has revealed their status as victims of the historical transformation in western Ireland, Grene insightfully notes McPherson’s implicit attempt to bridge the past and the present, to connect the city and the country milieu in The Weir. “The strategy of The Weir,” remarks Grene, “is in fact to collapse the distinction between the world of the archaic country pub and the modern city milieu from which Valerie comes. Loneliness, desolation, sexual perversion, morality are human experiences common to rural and urban life, the past and the present” (308). In other words, what McPherson aims to demonstrate in The Weir is a “universal humanism,” which transcends both temporal and spatial distance.

        Another crucial difference between McDonagh’s and McPherson’s portraits of Ireland lies in the relationships among their characters. While Maureen and Mag treat each other with betrayal and violence, the small community in The Weir offers consolation and sympathy. Such a strong contrast between the two authors’ writing styles, as well as their distinct perspectives of the life in rural Ireland, has fully revealed how the traditionally romanticized motherland can be variously represented in different minds, even though they are both labeled as “Irish writers.”

Work Citied

Grene, Nicholas. “Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson.” Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005): 298-331. Print.