In the last few days I've read five McDonagh plays. I will try to write a bit about each without spoiling much.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a drama, about a woman and her mother who live together and hate each other, that turns very violent towards the end. It hints at the characters of the town which show up in the next two plays, and it establishes the idea that you can never ever trust what a McDonagh character says about what happened offstage. This is useful information, but all too easy to forget.
Next is
A Skull in Connemara, which turns up the violence but takes it less seriously and is more of a comedy in general, and is to my mind the funniest and most
In Bruges-like of the plays. A man, hired by the church to dig up bones to clear space for more graves, ends up being assigned the grave of his wife, who died under questionable circumstances and is the subject of much hushed, mean-spirited gossip around the town. Don't know how that could be so funny? That's the magic of McDonagh.
To complete the Leenane trilogy we have
The Lonesome West, about two feuding brothers in the aftermath of their father's "accidental" shotgun-to-the-face death. It introduces a major character we've only heard about in the previous plays, and does a great job wrapping up the themes and subplots of the trilogy. I'd definitely recommend these three together if you read any one of them. (
You can get all three in one book for ten bucks at Amazon.
And if nothing else, you wanna read a lot because the Irishness takes a while to get used to.)
Next I read
The Lieutenant of Inishmore (and out of order I was, ya fecking feck, but that's the order I read 'em). A cat - who happens to be the pet and "best friend" of an absolute beast of an Irish rebel - dies, and this rebel comes to town looking for vengeance. This is by far the most over-the-top violent and crazy of McDonagh's work, and consequently it was my least favorite. There's just less room for humor and heart when people and animals are getting blown up, chopped up, etc. every few pages, and the plot is falling over itself to make that happen. I have to admit I'm verrry curious about how this was pulled off on the actual stage, though.
The Cripple of Inishmaan was the last I read, and luckily so, because it was my favorite of the plays (nearly up there with
The Pillowman, IMO) and the only one that could be described as anything close to "heartwarming." A crippled, orphaned boy gets a glimmer of hope in his awful life when a film crew comes to a neighboring island looking for native actors and extras. He fights against his health and against stifling small-town attitudes to get out there and take his chances for fame. That plot could make a bad tv movie or a great
South Park episode, but this play is really nothing like either of those possibilities.
