The Tarantino Of Theatre

“I never wanted to work at a real job,” declares young playwright Martin McDonagh as he sips a pre-lunch whiskey in the bar of Galway’s Spanish Arch Hotel. “I left school when I was still pretty young – I was about 16 – and I didn’t want to go to college or university. But I didn’t really want to work either. Unfortunately I had to and all that was really open to me was shit jobs in supermarkets and things like that. I did those kind of jobs part-time for a while but I usually packed them in pretty quickly.”

Swapping the trolley for the typewriter turned out to be a good move for London-born McDonagh. Nowadays, the former supermarket worker is the resident playwright for the Royal National Theatre in London and, having bowled the critics over with his debut play, The Beauty Queen Of Leenane (co-produced by the Royal Court and Galway’s Druid), he seems set to become the Tarantino of the theatre world.

Suddenly his scripts are hotter than hand grenades with six new plays about to go into production and theatrical agents still crying out for more. Numerous Hollywood moguls are also beginning to show a lot of interest in the young writer’s talent and, in the last few months, McDonagh has won both the prestigious George Devine Award and a Writer’s Guild Award for Best New Fringe Play Of The Year. The playwright himself is unimpressed by all of the acclaim however and isn’t taking any of it too seriously. When I mention the awards he asks me (jokingly) if I want to buy the Writer’s Guild trophy and describes the George Devine win as being for “the Most Promising Little Shit in theatre this year.”

“It might seem like it all happened really quickly for me,” he says, “but it took me 10 years from when I first started writing to get to where I am now. I’m 26 so I’m still young and all that but it still took quite a while for it all to happen in a sense. It took a whole decade.”

Certainly McDonagh’s success has been a while coming but there’s no doubting that it’ll be a lot longer going. “Outstanding”, “superb” and “brilliant” were amongst the milder adjectives used in almost every single review of The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, a dark and sinister Hitchcockian tale of lost opportunity and madness, set in the wilder parts of Co. Galway. Born in London in 1970 to Irish parents, McDonagh grew up around the Camberwell and Elephant & Castle areas but spent most of his summers in Ireland.

“My dad’s from Lettermullen and my mum’s from Sligo,” he explains. “But I haven’t spent an awful lot of time over here, just holidays as a kid which were mainly in Sligo until I was about 11 or 12 and after that they were mostly in Galway. My mum and dad moved back here five years ago so me and my brother come back to visit them regularly. I’m still based over in London but with the rehearsals for the play in Druid, this is the first time I’ve spent a lot of time in Galway city itself.”

He attributes his success to prolonged maternal encouragement.

“I think at the start I began writing because I had my mum nagging me to get a real job because I was unemployed for a long time,” he smiles. “I started off trying to do films because that was always my biggest interest, and still is. And nothing came of those. Then I tried short stories that could be made into short video films. Then it progressed to radio plays.”

Most writers garner more than enough rejection slips to wallpaper their bedsits in the early stages of their careers and McDonagh was no exception.

“I was rejected a lot,” he grins. “But at the very beginning I probably deserved to be. Like, I knew it was bad writing so everytime I sent something off it would take a couple of months to get rejected and, after a while I’d realise it was rubbish so I was never too upset when it came back and finally was rejected. But as time went on, especially with some of the radio plays, I knew that they were good. Some of them were really good and an awful lot better than some of the trash you hear on the BBC. Still, they sent them all back without even saying why. I had 22 radio plays rejected.

“Then I just got fed up with radio plays so I began to try stage plays. The first two were okay but not that good so I didn’t really count them. But from the third one on they got pretty good. I’ve written eight plays now. The Beauty Queen Of Leenane was the first to get properly produced and now six of the other seven are under option.”

Interestingly for a writer with so many rejections to his credit, he landed the writer-in-residence gig in the Royal National Theatre through the similar misfortunes of others. “I think a couple of directors had brought in two of my plays which they wanted to work on in there,” he explains, “and, it’s sad, but both directors were rejected but they still liked the plays, so it was good for me. So they gave me an eight week residency at the start just to check me out and help me develop. I did that for a while and got a good play out of it.

“But, to be honest, I don’t really like that kind of mollycoddling of writers and that whole writers’ group kind of thing. It just seems kind of fake to me. Really I just think you should stay at home, shut up and work until you come up with something good. Which is more or less what I’ve been doing the past couple of years. I’ve never really listened to any advice from other writers. I hope that’s why some of my stuff has kinda got some freshness to it.”

Although he’s currently being hailed as the new voice of British theatre, McDonagh isn’t actually a great fan of the stage. If pressed he’ll namecheck Mamet and Pinter as being influences but ultimately Hollywood is where his heart is.

“Theatre-wise I don’t really have many influences because I don’t really know too much about the history of it and so on,” he admits. “I never really had a love for it, I always thought of it as a really old and middle-class kind of artform, and I still do pretty much. I’m not necessarily trying to change it, I just want to have my voice heard in it. Films have been my biggest influence really.

“There’s not an awful lot of theatre that I like but the things I do like I like a lot,” he continues. “As an artform it’s as good as any. It’s a box to tell a story in, if you know what I mean. If you can just remember that and forget that most of your audience is gonna be old and rich white people then it’s fine. Perhaps that’s not so true over here but it certainly is in London. But my first love was always film so I try and introduce some cinematic aspects to my plays. A kind of speed. I hate those ponderous kind of plays with people talking about relationships for half an hour or whatever. I like short, sharp set-ups and scenes. And I like telling stories which is something theatre has lost over the last 20 or 30 years and which films always had. I think theatre should be open to everybody.

“Most of the theatre world is just a load of shit. Not so much over here but I try to avoid hanging out in those circles in London. It can be really hard because there’s just so much wanky old shit that goes on in London. It’s full of people who’ve written two decent lines of dialogue in 1974 and then made an entire career out of it. I can’t stand it.”

I take it you’re not a Groucho Club regular then?

“No way!” he laughs disgustedly. “I wouldn’t be seen dead there. Unless my agent is buying me lunch.”

It’s not just his agent who’s being buying McDonagh lunch recently. A couple of months ago he found himself in a New York restaurant with Al Pacino, after an American film producer had flown him over to tempt him with the Hollywood dollar.

“I’ve got some interest from film people in the States,” he says guardedly, “but the deal isn’t signed yet so I probably shouldn’t say too much about it. But things are looking pretty good. I’ll be glad to bypass the whole BBC 2/Channel 4 thing because they make such trash a lot of the time. I mean, Hollywood makes a lot of trash as well but at least they give you 20 times as much money.”

He might eventually make more money in film, but McDonagh’s doing alright for himself out of the theatre at the moment as well. “I’m making a good living at the moment,” he admits. “Beauty Queen has done very well. It’s been sold to a lot of theatre companies around Europe so I’m suddenly getting money for things I’d never even thought about. Somebody buys the German rights or the French rights and I get money from it. That’s something I’d never really thought about. But I’ve stopped doing commissions for plays now – it’s too much like homework. I’m only going to do one more play and, after that, I’m going to concentrate on film.”

He’s not tempted by fiction or journalism either, preferring to stick to what he knows best.

“I never had any real prose style,” he says. “I was always good at dialogue and images – stage and film – so I think the things to stick to are theatre and film. Especially film. I mean, I just don’t feel confident enough with short stories or novels really. I think I’m better off sticking to things I’m fairly good at. Well, hopefully fairly good at.”

And the best thing about all this success? “My mum’s very pleased with me,” he laughs. “She’s happy that I have a job at last!”