My Favourite Martin

Martin McDonagh wants you all to know about New York indie rockers The Walkmen. “It’s the only reason I agreed to do this interview,” the 38-year-old playwright and film director chuckles, pulling up a seat in the reception area of Galway’s House Hotel. “I just wanted to give my favourite band a plug in e.”

Hopefully, he’s also planning on talking about the new Druid production of his play The Cripple Of Inishmaan – a typically dark, and occasionally savage, tragicomedy which imagines the reactions of petty and insular Aran Islanders to the filming of Robert Flaherty’s 1934 movie Man of Aran – but I tell him to go ahead.
“Have you heard of The Walkmen?” he asks, in his strong London accent. “I used one of their songs in In Bruges. They’re just this really great American band, who’ve got four or five albums out now. I seriously think they’re one of the best things out there. They’re a lot more intelligent, but kind of have the same sound as a Strokes-like outfit. But somehow they’re totally obscure. I don’t know why. Maybe because they’re more poetic than The Strokes. Anyway, they’re playing Dublin at the end of October so you should definitely go check them out.”
Anybody else you’d like to big up while you’re at it?
“Actually, yeah, there’s another good guy called Micah Hinson. I saw him at the Electric Picnic, and I’ve seen him a bunch of other times. His first album, Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress, was really great.”
McDonagh seems to be in very good form tonight. During the pre-interview photo shoot in the hotel bar, a couple sitting nearby asked the tall, silver-haired and handsome writer if he was someone famous. “Nah, I’m just a wannabe,” he deadpanned.
Needless to say, McDonagh hasn’t been a wannabe for well over a decade. The last time we met was back in 1996, around the time his controversial first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was wowing audiences both here and in London, and critics were dubbing him “the Tarantino of theatre.”
People were predicting great things for the young London-born Irishman, pretty much all of which have come to pass – and then some! Even back then, at just a quarter century old, McDonagh (who’d dropped out of school aged 16) already had six other plays written and ready to go. Two more scripts made up what became known as the Leenane Trilogy, there was another trilogy set on the Aran Islands, and also a dark and twisted Orwellian piece entitled The Pillowman.
Over the course of the past 12 years, all seven of these plays have been repeatedly produced, acclaimed, damned and enjoyed by audiences all over the globe. In 1997, McDonagh had four works professionally produced on the London stage in a single season. The hysteria surrounding his reputation and rapid success was such that he was frequently touted as being the first dramatist since William Shakespeare to do so. He’s won more awards than he can probably even count.
Speaking of awards, his first foray into movies – a short film called Six Shooter starring Brendan Gleeson – earned him an Oscar in 2006. Earlier this year, his debut full length feature film In Bruges, starring Gleeson and Colin Farrell, was released to hugely positive reviews and performed extremely well at the box office.
Not that he’s left the theatre behind, by any means. Directed by Garry Hynes, Druid’s new production of The Cripple of Inishmaan is currently on an extensive tour around Ireland and England. The tour will culminate with a three-month run in New York’s prestigious Atlantic Theatre, ending in March 2009.

OLAF TYARANSEN: I know you still live in London, but do you come back to Ireland often?
MARTIN MCDONAGH: Yeah, a fair bit. My parents live in Spiddal so I’m back to see them quite regularly.
I spotted you in the Town Hall Theatre on the opening night of Cripple. Do you generally go to see many of your plays?
I’ll go to see one in a foreign language someplace if I haven’t been and the place appeals. I’ve been to see a couple in Tokyo. But all the productions, I’ve always gotten involved in the original rehearsal periods. So I did that for the Leenane Trilogy and, for this one, we did it at the National. But that’s why I came back here to do it again with Druid.
Do you sit in on rehearsals?
I’ve been in everyday of rehearsals. Well, actually I missed a week in the middle, but I was there for pretty much all the rehearsals in Dublin.
Most writers are barred from rehearsals, aren’t they?
Only by bad directors. And there’s a lot of them, so probably most writers are. It’s different in movies but, in fact, the playwright has an awful lot of power in the room and outside the room. They can only be barred if they allow themselves to be.
You sound like you learnt that lesson the hard way.
There was a production of Cripple in New York, the director didn’t let me in from day one, and the staging turned out to be a debacle, pretty much. So that’s one of the reasons to get so heavily involved in this production – knowing that it was going to New York, as well as going around some cool places in Ireland – was to make sure we got it right. Because, certainly in the New York part, we hadn’t gotten it right before.
The original National production I liked a lot, but I think there were still things I wanted to bring out of it that maybe we hadn’t touched on quite so much in the original production. Just the darker, sadder aspects. And I think we might have some more work to do, but we’re much closer to it now.
Do you workshop the scripts at all, or change lines of dialogue?
The scripts don’t change. I’ve never really workshopped anything. I’ve always been very anti-that. You should hold onto a play or a film script until you think it’s completely ready and be very rigorous with yourself about how good or bad it is. But once you come to the decision that it is good, workshop shouldn’t enter into it.
Were you always confident in your work?
I was confident about how badly I was writing for a long time, but then about how well I was writing when it changed. And how angry I was about how things that were way worse than what I was writing were getting put on. So that breeds a degree of confidence, I think. So yeah, I saw all the crap that was out there, and thought I was better than that. But it still took a long time.
You had 22 radio plays rejected before you began writing for the stage.
It was pretty tough. Because I was either on the dole or in the last year of civil service work – doing basic office admin crap to pay the bills. So it was either mind-numbing office work or poverty. I kind of enjoyed the poverty more than the mind-numbing office work! [laughs]
But because of that process of writing almost one play a week or a fortnight, it kind of hones your ear for dialogue and plot structure and character and all that kinda stuff. So right at the end of that, I tried stage plays. And probably the second and third of those attempts was Lonesome West and Beauty Queen. So all that frustration of being rejected but still feeling I was good ... once I attempted this new art form or story form, things just kind of exploded and opened up, and that kind of pent-up anger and honing of the skills all kind of came together in some way.
You wrote seven complete plays in less than 12 months in the early 90s. Is that massive burst of creativity not amazing to you looking back now?
Yes and no. I mean the 22 radio plays was probably a more concerted effort. It all happened in that year-and-a-half of being on the dole, having worked for a number of years. So that was a freedom. Also my brother, John, had just moved out of the house. He’d gone to LA on a screenwriting fellowship so I had space. So it was a combination of being freed from work and being free in the house.
Your brother is now a successful scriptwriter, isn’t he?
Yeah, he actually made a short film before I did, but also he wrote the Ned Kelly script that Heath Ledger did.
Are you competitive as brothers?
Luckily, I guess, for the past 10 years or so, I’ve stayed with the plays while he was involved in movies. He never really cared about the theatre at all. Now we’re kind of crossing over into each other’s territories a bit more, but I’ve never felt like there was any kind of antagonism between each other on that score. There may be on pretty much every other score in the world [laughs].
The Lonesome West is about the petty antagonism between two warring brothers. Was that based on yourself and John in any way?
I remember writing Lonesome West not consciously basing any of it on us or me and him, but then in the year after it came out, almost every single friend of ours said, ‘That’s you and that’s him’. It’s interesting. Maybe it came through the pores or something, the vitriol in that situation. But we were never like that. Our relationship has always been very much based on love, but we’d be very competitive, not so much in the writing actually, but in sports – football, tennis or something.
How many productions of your plays are running worldwide as we speak?
I’m not sure. I try to get my agent to keep me posted when there’s ones going on in places I’d be interested in going to. Not blowing my own trumpet, but there’s just too many to keep up with. You get strange dribbles of £60 or £150 from Bratislava or something. So it’s not big wads of cash, but it does add up to that because there’ll be probably 20 new productions a month. Remember the Leenane Trilogy are all one set, four characters. Two of those plays have strong women characters, which really appeals to amateur groups, too. Cripple has four women characters – so those things help. So the fact that they haven’t stopped going on has allowed me probably to have more ability to say no to film stuff, or to have any of them turned into films.
Does it bother you that the Abbey rejected your work in the 90s?
I don’t think it ever bothered me even then. I found it laughable at the time. I lost the rejection letter that they sent to me when they rejected the Leenane Trilogy, but I remember it said, ‘These plays will never have an appeal to a metropolitan theatre-going audience’. Elsewhere, it said they were ‘stage Irish’ and ‘childish’ and things like that. I remember even when I got it, I just thought they were so dumb to have missed it. I was still unemployed when I got that letter, but I knew then that there was more to my work than they were saying there was.
Still, you were probably fairly used to rejection by that stage.
Yeah. I remember six of the radio plays being rejected in one day. I got one letter that rejected all six of them! That’s pretty hard, because you’re waiting probably three months for someone to send you back your stuff. So to get six rejected – each of which you had hopes for – is tough.
But I found it laughable the stuff the Abbey was staging while they were rejecting my plays. Not just mine, but Conor McPherson’s stuff, too. And I think Mark O’Rowe’s early stuff, too. It seems like every single generation they miss it. Each time they get a new guy running the place – it’s invariably a guy apart from Garry’s [Hynes] tenure – they miss it or mess it up in a different way. Now obviously they’re supposedly cleaning out their house again and doing a much better job.
They still haven’t staged a Martin McDonagh play, have they?
They’ve been approaching me for the last year or two. But, for me, they don’t prove themselves to have changed by saying, ‘We want you now’. They’ll prove they’ve changed over the next couple of years by having brand new writers on the main stage and on the small stage. And to have three years of undiscovered new writing up there, that’s the only time they’ll have proved to have changed – and maybe then I’ll consider them.
You mentioned Conor McPherson a moment ago. Are you friendly with each other?
I haven’t seen him for ages, but the last couple of times we were on friendly terms. At the start, there was a little bit of rivalry I think. Down to drunken incidents in bars and things. But I like a lot of his stuff. I think as you get older, too, and he’d had health issues, so when something like that happens you realise that the rivalries or the antagonism you feel towards another writer is totally ridiculous. If you’re gonna express antagonism in interviews or whatever, it should be towards governments or politicians who’re actually doing some real damage, rather than towards some guy who writes things you don’t really like that much.
Speaking of drunken incidents, didn’t you once tell Sean Connery to ‘fuck off’ at an award ceremony?
That was at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. I thought it was a funny thing to do at the time. The whole awards thing seemed quite silly anyway. But I was also very nervous about that kind of thing. I was up for the one award that night where you know you’re gonna get it early – Best Newcomer or something. So my brother and I got tanked up on vodka before we left. It was an afternoon show as well. I remember having two big triple vodkas at about 11.30 in the morning. Then we went to the thing and started on the free wine. And free wine to us then was like, ‘Wow! Free stuff! And it’s alcohol!’ [laughs]
We didn’t stand when they were toasting the Queen. We were kind of mumbling – nothing rude, but kind of anti-Queen stuff. We had reasons for not wanting to toast the Queen. So Connery put his hand on my shoulder and tells me to shut up or leave. I apologised at first, and then my brother said, ‘Don’t take that from him!’ So I kinda caught myself, realised he was right, and told Connery, ‘Fuck off!’
But of course it was a roomful of journalists, basically – journalists and actors. And at that moment there was one of those silences, and every single head kind of turned. Connery obviously didn’t really know how to come back so he was kind of caught in terms of what to do. So he went off and sat down. And that was about it. I went off and picked up the award, and I pretty much can’t really remember much else of what happened from then on.
But the next day I thought it might be a little piece in the paper – just a little two-inch story on page 3 or whatever. But it was a big story. And even at the same time, I thought it was kind of a punk fuck off thing to do at an awards ceremony. I didn’t really stress about it. I didn’t think it would be as big a deal where I’m still getting asked about it ten years later.
The last time we met, you told me that you saw theatre as a stepping stone to movies.
Did I say ‘stepping stone’? I suppose I might have said something like ... [pauses]. Because I’ve never actually believed that. Because they’re not. Maybe, shortly before Beauty Queen came out, I was feeling that way about the theatre. But in the next couple of years, my attitude definitely changed.
Even so, you’ve now progressed to movies. Were you surprised to win an Oscar for your first attempt [Best Short Film for Six Shooter]?
It was totally bizarre to me. How could it not be? Like you’re making a short film, and the only reason for making a short film is to maybe see if you can do it. For it even to be seen on Channel 4 or Network 2 isn’t even on the agenda when you’re making a short film. It certainly wasn’t for me.
Was the Oscar a disappointment then?
Ha, ha! No! Why?
Just that it happened so effortlessly...
That whole thing was all so crazy. I didn’t even have a chance or a moment to think anything. It was like winning the lottery, but it’s a lottery that you didn’t even know you’d entered – or even had much respect for. Because for me as a film buff, I think of all those Orson Welles films that were shut out or were hated. Malick was another, and all of Scorsese’s films. So of course it’s a joke. But it’s an enjoyable joke.
For someone like me who loves all the people who never won, the idea of even making one feature film would be the be all and end all. And certainly Oscars or any of that kind of schtick would have no relevance or importance. Even now, to make a film that would last is the thing. Every single one of my favourite films probably didn’t even get a single nomination. And were probably made by people who didn’t give a fuck about awards. So it was amusing and fun to be handed something like that out of the blue.
Before you started shooting In Bruges, you insisted on three weeks of rehearsals with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. That’s not standard movie practise, is it?
That was mostly down to my nerves and me just not knowing what the hell I was gonna do. I remember on the first day getting a coffee with Colin and Brendan – just the three of us, literally, sitting across a table and me thinking, ‘What do I say now?’ I literally had no idea what to do. So we just read it and then talked.
But I think Colin and Brendan had the same thing. They were like, ‘We’re not used to this. This could kill our process’ – you know, kill the spontaneity that they need. But I guess Brendan’s background is more theatrical, so he was possibly less wary of it. But I think you realise the things you’ve picked up over the years in rehearsal rooms. And the thing I’ve always had script-wise – like knowing a script, knowing why a character is behaving this way or saying this specific thing. And having lived with the script in my head for almost two years, you know each line and you know why each moment is happening so you can answer all the questions. So basically it was just a nice period of every single question being asked and answered. So there wasn’t any of that time wasted – well, it’s never really wasted – on the set. Which gave me time to learn a bit more about lenses and pan shots and all that kind of stuff. But it is rare, but I think that’s why so many films are ... [smiles].
You’re happy with the film?
I really like what we got with Bruges. It’s basically their relationship.
What are you doing next?
Well, originally I wanted to take a couple of years off after Bruges. But I’ve got two film scripts that are ready to go. There’s one I wrote before Bruges called Suicide On Sixth Street, and there’s a more recent one called Seven Psychopaths, which I think is the best of the three, really.
What’s it about? Aside from seven psychopaths, obviously.
Em ... I’ll not give you any more.
There are some other plays and scripts listed in your biography in the programme that I didn’t recognise – like The Banshees of Inisheer and The Retard is Out in the Cold. Have they been produced?
No. Some of those are scripts that I’ve finished, but that I have to go back to, or scripts that are ready but won’t be seen for say two or three years. I always used to like at the end of James Bond films, they’d say ‘Coming Next – Octopussy’. And it’d be two years, but as a kid you’d be going, ‘Wow! Octopussy is the next one!’ I thought that was so cool to plan two years ahead. So that’s why I always have the future plays or film scripts listed.
I always liked that Beckett quote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”