Martin McDonagh

Martin Faranan McDonagh (born 26 March 1970) is a British-Irish playwright, screenwriter, director, and producer.

He is known for his absurdist black humour which often challenges the modern theatre aesthetic.

He has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award, six BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, three Olivier Awards, and nominations for five Tony Awards.

McDonagh was born on 26 March 1970 in Camberwell, London, to Irish parents.

His mother (originally from Killeenduff, Easky, County Sligo) and his father (originally from Leitir Mealláin, Connemara, County Galway) moved back to Galway in 1992, but McDonagh and his brother (writer-director John Michael McDonagh) stayed in London.

Separated into two trilogies, McDonagh's first six plays are located in and around County Galway, where he spent his holidays as a child.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is the followup play which was written as a response to the 1993 Warrington bombings when two children were killed by the IRA.

It is a dark comedy in which the insane leader of an INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) splinter group discovers that his best friend, a cat, has been killed.

His plays, many of which have been produced on the West End and on Broadway, include The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), The Lonesome West (1997), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), The Pillowman (2003), A Behanding in Spokane (2010), and Hangmen (2015).

The first is set in Leenane, a small village on the west coast of Ireland, and consists of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), A Skull in Connemara (1997) and The Lonesome West (1997).

His second trilogy is set across the Aran Islands, off the coast of County Galway, and consists of The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), and The Banshees of Inisheer.

The third play was never published, as McDonagh insisted it "isn't any good", though he expressed a desire to return to it when he is older.

In 2022, McDonagh directed a film titled The Banshees of Inisherin. The screenplay's resemblance to the play is unclear.

The play was well received on its opening night in Galway in 1996 and was next produced off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in 1998.

The play premiered in 1997 at Town Hall Theatre, Galway.

The play opened in 1997 at the Royal National Theatre (Cottesloe) in London.

The play transferred to Broadway in April 1998 and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play.

The second part of the trilogy, A Skull in Connemara, involves a Connemara man who is employed to exhume skeletons in an overcrowded graveyard and he encounters the wife whom he was once accused of killing.

It opened in April 1998 Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, with Ruaidhri Conroy in the title role on both occasions.

Also in 1998, Frederick Koehler played the title role in the Geffen Playhouse production in Los Angeles, California.

In 1999 he was one of the recipients of the V Europe Prize Theatrical Realities awarded to the Royal Court Theatre (with Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Jez Butterworth, Conor McPherson).

The play ran on Broadway in 1999 and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play in 1999.

The Cripple of Inishmaan is a dark comedy in which a crippled teenager schemes to attain a role in Man of Aran.

The play was presented at the Royal Court Theatre (London), and made its US premiere at the A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) in Seattle, Washington in July to August 2000.

The play ran off-Broadway from January to May 2001 at the Gramercy Theatre, produced by the Roundabout Theatre.

The final part is titled The Lonesome West, a play involving two brothers bickering in the aftermath of the supposedly accidental fatal shooting of their father.

McDonagh's first non-Irish play, The Pillowman, is set in a fictitious totalitarian state and premiered at the Royal National Theatre in 2003, after a reading at the Finborough Theatre in 1995.

McDonagh won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for Six Shooter in 2004 and has received nominations for six other Academy Awards.

The play was produced Off-Broadway in February 2006 by the Atlantic Theater Company.

It transferred to Broadway in May 2006 and received a 2006 Tony Award nomination for Best Play.

The Banshees of Inisheer, the third play of the trilogy, was not produced.

It is unclear how close the 2022 McDonagh-directed film The Banshees of Inisherin comes to the original material.

The film's screenplay was published in 2022.

He directed the dark comedy films In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).

In December 2008, The Cripple of Inishmaan was produced Off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company, in conjunction with The Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland.

A Behanding in Spokane is McDonagh's first play that is set in the United States and it premiered on Broadway in March 2010.

Lead actor Christopher Walken was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance as a killer looking for the hand he lost in his youth.

McDonagh also penned two prize-winning radio plays, one of which is The Tale of the Wolf and the Woodcutter.

In February 2010, an announcement revealed that McDonagh was working on a new stage musical with composer Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson.

The trilogy starts off with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which is the story of the dysfunctional relationship between a spinster and her domineering mother, during the course of which the former faces her last chance at love, and the latter faces a rather grim end.