MARTIN McDonagh, the 26 year old London born playwright of Irish descent who won such acclaim last year with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, has divided the critics with his new play at London's National Theatre, The Cripple of Inishmann.
The tale revolves around Billy (played by Ruaidhri Conroy), a young cripple so ugly he'd never get a girl, living on the Aran Islands in 1934, during the filming of Man Of Aran.
In the critics' No lobby, there is great consensus: too Oirish, too little heart. "I emerged from Nicholas Hytner's lovingly acted and directed production with a resentful sense of having been conned by a writer of undoubted talent," writes Paul Taylor in the London Independent, adding that the writing has as yet "no artistic principle or moral scruple" and that McDonagh's relationship to his material seems to be "primarily a heartless, opportunistic one".
In the Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer ends a review in which the complaint of "heartlessness" is heard again, with the words: "I still don't feel I've cracked the McDonagh enigma. Is he a potentially great dramatist, or merely a very clever one? On this evidence, I'm beginning to incline towards the latter verdict."
Under the heading "Manipulative Moonshine", Alastair Macaulay writes in the Financial Times: "Some of the laborious echoes and repetitions McDonagh keeps putting into the mouths of his characters belittle Ireland very determinedly."
Perhaps the most influential print critic in the UK is the Guardian's Michael Billington, whose review is judiciously mixed. He sees McDonagh's main preoccupation as being the layers of myths which have been foisted on Ireland, from Synge's Playboy through to Man Of Aran, and this generates rich comedy, he writes. "The richest, funniest scene is that in which Flaherty's film is shown on Inishmaan; the islanders either ignore it totally inpursuit of their local feuds or laboriously question its authenticity, crying: "It's rare that off Ireland you got sharks," he says. His problems with the play centre on the device of comic reversal, which he says becomes too mechanical. He also hopes McDonagh will move from ironic commentary on Ireland to "rigorous self revelation".
Benedict Nightingale writes the most positive review in the London Times, though he is out of step with the rest of the critics in calling McDonagh "a realist in the tradition of Synge, O'Casey, Friel and Billy Roche" (an odd set to put together, if you ask me). Nightingale continues: "He is also a born storyteller with a precocious sense of dramatic structure."
