Notes on Martin McDonagh

Back to Martin McDonagh. This blog didn’t need another category… McDonagh isn’t even Irish. Almost. He is anyway the less Irish of the two brothers. Anyway… [BTW: I’m not an English mothertongue. Don’t hold it against me… ;-)]

Anyway I think:

1. That Martin McDonagh is f*ing genius.
2. That Martin McDonagh is a new Samuel Beckett.

As Beckett has been an Irish author despite his (voluntary!) undergoing to a process of Frenchification, so too Martin is and will be, even if reluctantly, an Irish author.

Here we restart. From here, with what I already wrote about Martin McDonagh:

• Los Angeles, Connemara: una non recensione di 7 Psicopatici (ITA)
• Joyce and Beckett In Bruges with Martin McDonagh (ENG)
• Metti Joyce e Beckett. A Bruges. Anzi: In Bruges (ITA)

• Una prospettiva Beckettiana per Martin McDonagh – Umanità e animali: l’impossibile empatia (ITA)
• Martin McDonagh’s: a Beckettian perspective – Mankind and animals: the impossibility of empathy (ENG)

I gathered some tools to unhinge the brilliant London-born, Connemara-raised Martin’s brain: I read what I have found in Italian (not so much indeed), And I started to read in English the Martin’s opera omnia. And I did it: just A Behanding In Spokane is still to be read.
I’m just out from the reading (reading and re-reading: this is probably the very first time that I immediately restart to read a just finished book) of The Pillowman. By the way: The Pillowman is a f*ing masterpiece, and it made me to take the decision to start, immediately, the Martin McDonagh’s files section on Italish.

Because McDonagh is (another…) Irish literature genius. And I want to let him know that! So I asked David The Man Who Explodes The Cow Collins (I met him in Dublin by chance few days ago) to tell it to Martin. Only in Dublin…

There is another, critic, tool for McDonagh: Patrick Lonergan’s book The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh. Why there is not already a Lonergan’s interview on Italish about McDonagh? Because he didn’t answer. We hope he’ll change his mind about that: we are Irish and optimism is part of our culture…

Coming back to Martin. Martin is definitely a smartass: he spreads autobiographical hints in his works and immediately he hides them. You shouldn’t write autobiographical stuff:

I think people only write about what they know because they’re too fucking stupid to make anything up.
(The Pillowman)

Because only eejits write autobiographical stuff.

But 7 Psychiopaths is f*ing autobiographic! Leenane’s trilogy, and (no, Arans’ one is not a trilogy: someone should tell to Martin a story about himself, tortured if he doesn’t finish and publish The Banshees Of Inisheer. Just in case…) Arans’ dilogy come out from… McDonagh’s family summer holidays, the emigrants’ holidays: back home. Back in Connemara, in that ontic nothingness  (emptiness is nothingness: but not in Connemara. If the Greek philosophers had seen the Connemara as it is, they’d have solved once for all the ontological snag: nothing can be, it has a name and the name is Connemara) which Martin filled up (a revenge against  countless, eternal rainy afternoon, I suppose) with psychopath – sociopath murders.

Recapitulating, to finish the first McDonagh’s file:

• Martin McDonagh is not completely Irish and his relationship with his Irishness is one of his metanarratives;
• that is not his only metananarrative: to tell stories about story-tellers (and the way how the stories have to be narrated) is another basic metanarrative;
• stepping down from metanarratives to narratives, McDonagh has some recurring narrative themes, independent from metanarratives.

Enough. I hope McDonagh’s fans will stumble on this post: I’d like to feel not to much alone…

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