What Three Billboards and In Bruges director Martin McDonagh’s plays tell us about his films

Pillow talk: A production of McDonagh’s ‘The Pillowman’ (Brisbane Powerhouse)

Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was the biggest film winner at the 2018 Golden Globes, scooping four awards including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. It was an epochal moment for the writer-director, not least because he is on record as saying that films saved his life – and one senses his theatrical work was initially conceived as a means to break into the film industry. Despite this, McDonagh is arguably the most brilliant living playwright, and his stage work offers a clear blueprint for what came later.

Incredibly, the writer’s first six plays were written in an intense 10-month long period between 1994 and 1995. McDonagh had left school at 16 and spent several years unemployed while living in south London. Eventually, he secured a low-level position in the civil service but gave it up to have a go at writing. With no formal training and a social life that consisted largely of watching films and eating takeaway, he produced a trilogy of plays set in and around County Galway, an area the writer knew well from holidays as a child.

McDonagh has said he has a “respect for the whole history of films and a slight disrespect for theatre”, not least because of the ludicrous amount of money required to actually attend a show in the West End or on Broadway. Perhaps, as a result of this attitude towards the form, the plays proved uniquely provocative but immensely popular. Indeed, in 1997 he became the first playwright since William Shakespeare to have four plays running simultaneously on the professional London stage.

The first of McDonagh’s plays, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, set the tone in 1996. The tale of an ageing spinster and her domineering elderly mother, this was a work influenced as much by the films of Quentin Tarantino as the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Dark, violent and grotesquely funny, McDonagh’s debut was a critical and commercial success. The writer received criticism in some quarters for how male-oriented his first two feature films seemed, and yet his debut stage work was dominated by women and passed the Bechdel test with ease.

A Skull in Connemara followed in 1997 before McDonagh completed the Leenane trilogy with The Lonesome West. The latter concerned two bickering brothers in the immediate aftermath of the supposedly accidental murder of their father. Undoubtedly influenced by Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, The Lonesome West now feels like an In Bruges prototype. A scabrous, hilarious examination of toxic masculinity, the play only lacks the majestic line about Tottenham Hotspur that would prove the highlight of McDonagh’s big screen debut with In Bruges, a film that turns 10 this year.

The Aran Islands plays were even more ambitious and outrageous than the Leenane trilogy. The Cripple of Inishmaan proved as provocative as its title, and the revival starring Daniel Radcliffe enjoyed acclaim in London and New York in recent years. The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) directly addressed The Troubles in Ireland and must be one of the bloodiest plays ever staged in the West End, so let’s hope the Noel Coward Theatre in London has plenty of cleaning supplies since it will be revived there in June.

Detractors suggested that the batch of plays written in the mid-1990s had exhausted the literary talent of their creator, but McDonagh responded with The Pillowman in 2003, a Kafkaesque tale of a writer living in a police state being interrogated about his grisly short stories and their similarities to a spate of murders in the town. Like his disappointing second feature, Seven Psychopaths, The Pillowman deconstructed the artistic process but, quite unlike that film, it’s a masterpiece. Arguably McDonagh’s magnum opus, the production in New York with Jeff Goldblum remains the best thing I have seen on a stage.

A Behanding in Spokane, staged in New York just a couple of years before the release of Seven Psychopaths was, like Three Billboards, a departure for the writer since it took place in the United States and touched on racial prejudice. Again, like Three Billboards, the play courted controversy with some feeling McDonagh was too far removed from the realities of racism in America to tackle the issue. Tellingly, A Behanding in Spokane remains the only one of his plays that is yet to be staged in London.

The playwright’s most recent effort, Hangmen, felt almost cinematic in scope and suggests a symbiotic relationship might have developed between his works in the two different mediums. The play told the story of the fictional Harry Wade, England’s second-best hangman, in the aftermath of the abolition of hanging in this country in 1965. A return to form, Hangmen, like McDonagh’s latest film, was an awards success with an all-star cast.

It remains to be seen whether the writer will choose to focus on film or theatre for the remainder of his career, but it’s safe to assume his preoccupations and themes won’t change radically in the foreseeable future. His next project will debut at the Bridge Theatre in London in October and has a title that could apply to just about any of his work: A Very Very Very Dark Matter.