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未命名 4
Martin McDonagh
作品
Martin McDonagh
O'Toole, Fintan.
Introduction. Martin McDonagh Plays: 1.
London: Methuen, 1999.
ix-xvii.
Print.
Martin McDonagh, the son of a Sligo mother and
a Galway father, grew up in this kind of London. He had Irish aunts and uncles all
around. His family lived on a block in Elephant and Castle where half the houses
were occupied by Irish families. It was a similar story when they moved down the
road to Camberwell. He spent his summer holidays in Easkey, County Sligo
and in Connemara, the western region of County Galway.
He became a choir boy in the Catholic parish church and grew up steeped in the
emotive stories of Irish nationalism. Later, his parents moved back to
Lettermullan in Connemara, and although he and his older brother stayed behind
in London, they continued to spend their summers
in Ireland.
He was, and is, a citizen of an indefinite land that is neither Ireland nor England, but that shares borders
with.
He is, too, part of a generation that has
completely redefined the term ‘Anglo-Irish'. It used to mean, in Brendan Behan's
scabrous definition, ‘a Protestant on a horse', a member of the old Irish
ascendency with deep cultural and political affinities for England. Much of
twentieth-century Irish theatre—Yeats, John Synge, Augusta Gregory, Denis
Johnston—is rooted, however uncomfortably, in that tradition. Now, though,
Anglo-Irish has come to mean anew kind of fusion that arises, not from
ascendency but from exile. The children of Irish emigrants, growing up with all
the accents and attitudes of urban England are finding or making their
own connections with Irish culture. In music, the songwriter and singer Shane
McGowan is the obvious example. In sport, it is Jack Charlton's Irish soccer
team of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the theatre now it is Martin McDonagh.
For him, there was none of the exile's
longing, none of the proper nostalgic clutch of the ould sod. There was no
‘Irish community', just people who happened to be around the place. The
childhood influences of Catholicism and nationalism wore off. An yet, there was,
for him, a crucial Ireland.
It was not a pace or a faith or a community or even a family. It was not even,
as you might expect from a young writer, a literary or theatrical culture: Synge
or Yeats, Joyce or Beckett, though Synge's
The Playboy of the Western World is certainly a presence behind
A Skull in Connemara and the same
play's title is from a line in Beckett's
Waiting for Godot. It was just a voice in the head, a way of talking. (
ix-
x)
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作品
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
Castleberry, Marion.
“Comedy and Violence in The Beauty Queen
of Leenane.”
Martin McDonagh: A Casebook.
Ed. Richard Ranking Russell. London:
Routledge, 2007. 41-59. Print.
First performed by the Druid Theatre Company
at the Town Hall Theatre Galway on February 1, 1996,
The Beauty Queen of Leenane premiered
when McDonagh was only twenty-five years old. The production, directed by Garry
Hynes, garnered the playwright three major London Awards—the George Devine Award
for Promising Newcomer, the Writer's Guild for Best Fringe Play, and the
Evening Standard Award for Most
Promising Playwright. The play also received several Broadway and off-Broadway
awards: an Obie Award for sustained excellence of performance, a Drama League
Award for Bet Production of a Play, a Lortel Award for Outstanding Play and
Direction, and Outer Critics Award for Best Broadway Paly, and four Tony Awards
for excellence in acting.
McDonagh claims to have written the play in
just eight days, an assertion supported by the fast-paced dialogue and simple
narrative of the work. Ostensibly, The Beauty of Leenane is an old-fashioned
melodrama, depicting a classic tumultuous mother/daughter relationship. Mag
Folan and her daughter, Maureen, live in a small, dreary village in Connemara,
western Ireland.
The aging Mag is childishly selfish, demanding, and manipulative. Maureen, a
frustrated forty-year-old virgin who cares for her mother, is mentally fragile
and emotionally trapped. At a neighbor's party, Maureen renews her acquaintance
with Pato, an Irish immigrant her own age who works in England. The
meeting leads to a mutual attraction and an unconsummated one-night stand. Mag
attempts to destroy the budding relationship. Pato returns to England but writes to Maureen, asking her to go
to America
with him. Mag intercepts and burns the letter, but when Maureen later taunts her
mother with the sexual affair that never happened, Mag inadvertently reveals her
knowledge of the truth about Maureen and Pato's relationship. As revenge for her
mother's deception, Maureen tortures Mag by scalding her with boiling oil. Mag
confesses to burning the letter and reveals its contents, which precipitates
Maureen's murder of her mother and her apparent descent into madness. (42)
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