Joyce Flynn looks at the Cripple of Inishmaan

An obscure London neighborhood has produced the most notorious Irish playwright of the milennium’s closing years. Martin McDonagh, whose The Cripple of Inishmaan makes its New England premiere at the A.R.T. this May, is the author of the award-winning script co-produced by the Druid and Royal Court Theatres in Galway, London, Dublin, and New York, The Beauty Queen of Leenane. McDonagh not only writes plays of Ireland, but trilogies: The Beauty Queen was the first drama in his Connemara trilogy which also included A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. The Cripple of Inishmaan is the first play of a trilogy which the playwright expects to include two additional plays related to the Aran Islands, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and Inisheen, scripts awaiting production by London’s Royal National Theatre. McDonagh believes The Lieutenant of Inishmore may be his best play to date; audiences will get their first view of the script, which touches on things Northern Irish, in 1999.

As the son of a Connemara father and a Sligo mother who labored as construction worker and maid in London, McDonagh would seem to be miscast as the disciplined and prodigious dramatist who in his twenties has already received several of the most coveted awards in English-language theatre. A school dropout at sixteen, on his own power he wrote and submitted to the BBC twenty-two radio scripts, and didn’t allow the twenty-two rejection notices to keep him from trying his hand at stage plays, seven completed to date. McDonagh’s talent seems to have been stimulated by an older brother, also a writer, and from McDonagh’s enthusiasm for contemporary films and television. McDonagh, when he acknowledges the influence of any playwright, admits to an enthusiasm for three dramatists whose credits span stage and screen: Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet.

But it is impossible for anyone absorbed in Irish culture not to see throughout McDonagh’s Leenane trilogy and The Cripple of Inishmaan the legacy of the Anglo-Irish playwright John Millington Synge, famous for his poetic language, for his tight dramatic structure, and for the controversy his plays generated concerning national portrayals. Cultural nationalists decried (and some audiences rioted over) what they saw as violence and female indecency in Synge’s characterizations of the rural Irish in The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Both Synge and McDonagh underwent a self-conscious search for a version of the English language as spoken in Ireland but nevertheless capable of mediation on stage for non-Irish audiences who spoke English. Synge described attempts to convey the reality of Irish speech in “a comprehensible and natural form.” McDonagh encountered frustration with the dialogue he composed until he began to listen to voices already in his head, the voices of Irish uncles and the world his parents (now retired back to Ireland) abandoned for work in England.

McDonagh says it was the discovery of the language for the stage plays which unlocked his prodigious creativity; he found the idiom on which he could build in the English of his father’s boyhood region. “In Connemara and Galway, the natural dialogue style is to invert sentences and use strange inflections. Of course, my stuff is a heightening of that, but there is a core strangeness of speech, certainly in Galway.” Two striking examples from the first scene’s exposition:

Eileen: Not being cruel to Billy, but you’d see nicer eyes on a goat.

Johnny: A little exodus Johnnypateenmike foresees to the big island so, of any lasses or lads in these parts with the looks of a film star about them, wants to make their mark in America.

Later in the play, and less successfully, the extraordinary Helen gives a less successful explanation for her conduct toward others, perpetrating verbal violence which mirrors her behavior.

Helen: I do have to be so violent, or if I’m not to be taken advantage of anyways I have to be so violent.

The different purposes to which Synge and McDonagh put stage Hibernian English, famous for its interrogative flair and frequent exclamations, can best be seen in the contrasting use of formulaic repetition, the residue of an Irish oral tradition depending on ritual recitation and memory. Synge employs the device to lend dignity to the grief of the bereaved women in Riders to the Sea. The keen for the dead brother begins, “It’s destroyed we are from this day. It’s destroyed, surely.” In The Cripple of Inishmaan, as early as the first scene Billy’s Aunt Kate echoes the situation of the women awaiting the word of another drowning in Riders to the Sea:

Kate: Is Billy not home yet?

The absent Billy, the play’s title character, is whiling the day away in a staring match with a cow in a nearby meadow; Kate should know this from experience. But when she repeats statements about her worrying over the lad, she is taken up sharply by her sister, Eileen.

Eileen: Already once you’ve said that sentence.

The first five minutes of The Cripple of Inishmaan thus introduce a pattern of repetitious reminders against repetition. These collisions reach a high point in scene three, which contains an exasperating exchange between the storyteller Johnnypateenmike and the boatman Babbybobby. Johnny’s curiosity concerning the boat’s readiness seem to echo some half-remembered archaic formula but are nevertheless pointless and rich in the comic device Henri Bergson labeled “something mechanical encrusted upon the human.” In McDonagh’s world, repeating questions and statements may be half-understood by the character in question as an attempt to ennoble life; but McDonagh’s countering the pattern with other characters’ objections underlines the potentially simple-minded sound of such speeches to audience ears.

The near-absurdist repetitions in The Cripple of Inishmaan underscore the Syngean plot structure of an isolated group reacting to important news delivered in a manner befitting its significance. In Synge’s dramas, the bearing of news and the telling of tales are accorded a deference parallel to that which poets and historians received in wholly oral Celtic civilization. The respect is not merely habitual but informed by the awareness of the teller’s crucial role: an island of seafarers too often requires the news of bodies washed ashore and an isolated world correctly cherishes its links to the rest of human activity.

But the news brought to eager listeners on McDonagh’s Inishmaan is unimportant, out of date, and frequently inaccurate as well. McDonagh presents as news bringer and tale-teller an idle and interfering gossip named Johnnypateenmike, whose maximizing of minor news into three-part announcements and whose jealousy concerning secrets and interruptions makes him almost the most irascible character in a play full of testy people. The subversive impact is to undercut communication, speaker, and listener and give the impression that no news is worth hearing – though Johnnypateenmike’s dismissal of a newspaper piece about a fella “riz to power in Germany, has an awful funny mustache on him” suggests that a world of trivia is not without danger. Inevitably in McDonagh fashion, the reading about Hitler simply leads to a new context for provincial repetition, as Johnnypateenmike’s ninety-year-old alcoholic mother inserts “Germans” into a statement that recurs in the play and is applied to such diverse groups as American filmmakers, Frenchmen, and sharks:

Mammy: Ireland mustn’t be such a bad place if German fellas want to come to Ireland.

Here, and at other points in The Cripple of Inishmaan, the audience senses something familiar in the language, structure, history strangely twisted. Is it possible that the play is in fact a send-up of many previous Irish dramas, those of Synge, O’Casey, and their theatrical heirs? Touted as returning the contemporary drama to its storytelling roots, McDonagh on close observation is doing something quite different, undercutting the coherence of stories by constant reversals which begin to form a pattern of their own. McDonagh admitted to a deconstruction project of sorts in connection with The Beauty Queen of Leenane and his first trilogy: “I like the trick of leading the audience up to think they’re dealing with an archetypal Irish situation, and then you give them a great smack and show that they aren’t.” McDonagh’s reversals are not the anticlimactic dramatic finale for scenes so characteristic of twentieth-century Irish drama, but ironic turnarounds throughout the script, The result is an unpredictable stage world in which a kindly boatman suddenly beats a cripple with a lead pipe, or a banal character is discovered to have performed heroically in a past event, but continues to be whiningly unbearable in the present.

The reviewer Michael Billington, writing for The Guardian, has suggested viewing McDonagh’s drama on Inishmaan as an ironic postmodern critique whose central theme is an exploration of reality versus fantasy. Is there a real western Ireland, or even a real Ireland, separate from the mythmaking of authors? Synge’s writing at the turn of the last century established the mythic Aran Islands for thousands of theatregoers and readers of plays. By the time Robert Flaherty’s film The Man of Aran was released in 1934, its shots of rocky coasts, Atlantic storms, and thatched-roof cottages merely developed a setting already fixed in the Irish, American, and English mental landscape by years of exposure to makeshift scenery.

McDonagh counts on an awareness of Synge and Flaherty’s work as background to his own picture of Inishmaan, poised in 1934 between unchanged centuries and discovery by the rest of the world. At the turn of this century, the international feature film industry from Ryan’s Daughter on has feverishly accelerated the mythmaking, seductively wooing audiences with glorious cliffs, beaches, and natives, and (the joys of video distribution) often in their own homes. When Garry Hynes, the artistic director at Galway’s Druid Theatre and former artistic director at London’s Royal Court and Dublin’s Abbey Theatres, found the first McDonagh in the pile of submitted playscripts, it must have seemed not a moment too soon. The Druid company had long been at work on the thematic demythologization of the the West of Ireland and on the theatrical dislocation of the “Abbey style” of naturalism in acting and set design, achievements the cinematic work was surpassing in demographics if not in artistic values. An Ireland joined to the European Union must understand itself – even as the Irish tourist industry thrives on the romanticism of others.

McDonagh’s pictures of a remote life in which authority had vanished were a potential elixir – albeit an unpleasant medicine. The dreary eccentrics, the disproportionate violence, the cruelty to humans and animals, must have seemed almost refreshing in place of one more scenic vista. McDonagh’s audiences can perhaps learn indifference to romantic scenes of man and nature from the audience for the The Man of Aran screening in The Cripple of Inishmaan, where the characters are highly critical of the film, albeit (another McDonagh reversal?) in the pettiest fashion. Is the Irish cultural critic Fintan O’Toole correct in his assessment that McDonagh’s plays suggest that with romantic idealism gone, with local custom dwarfed by global operations, and with all authority collapsed, what will dominate is a tyranny of trivial concerns, increasingly blown out of proportion by those concerned, who will resort to violence over potato chips (The Lonesome West) or a necessary deception between friends (The Cripple of Inishmaan)?

As controversy rages over McDonagh’s portrayal of rural Ireland as a claustrophobic backwater in which eccentric characterizations and acts of cruelty occur in numbers disproportionate to the scant population, some critics noting an apparent lack of dramatist empathy for the denizens of McDonagh’s Leenane have suggested that his use of Irish material may be opportunistic at best. Is his protracted development of real and imagined Irelands in collision savvy careerism in the Riverdance decade, when all things Celtic seem to be in vogue?

The experienced Irish director Garry Hynes thinks not. “He needed that distance,” she insists. “The Ireland he encounters provokes his imagination. So he does not just recreate some sort of observed reality – there’s a chemistry that takes place and he creates an imagined world.” McDonagh, too, finds the geographical fit just right as he applies his playmaking skills to aspects of his heritage: “It’s definitely easier to write about things from a distance – especially when you just want to tell stories, which is all I want to do. It leaves the entire focus on the story and not on your politics, social life, sexuality, class, creed, and whatever. . . .”

By the Irish Republic’s standards for citizenship, the London-born child of two Irish citizens who emigrated for economic opportunity is easily defined as Irish, albeit “nonresident Irish.” By George Bernard Shaw’s rule of thumb, McDonagh also makes the cut. Shaw, ruling that “there is no Irish race,”nevertheless insisted that “there is an Irish climate, which will stamp an immigrant more deeply and durably in two years, apparently, than the English climate will in two hundred. It is reinforced by an artificial economic climate which does some of the work attributed to the natural geographic one. . . .” All those summers of the London grandson listening to grandparents back in Connemara would seem to add up to the minimum required exposure to the Irish climate. But McDonagh’s case is one which suggests that ethnicity may be increasingly elusive of expectation in a globally mobile future.

Joyce Flynn is Research Associate in Celtic Literature at Harvard University.