THE Druid Theatre in Galway has been cleared for rehearsals of Martin McDonagh's trilogy of plays, and now the writer is being interrogated by the police. It is not clear where the writer comes from. He is in his 20s and he lives with his older brother. He writes strange, stark stories, redolent of violence and dark with mystery. The two detectives who are questioning him read out bits of them and want him to explain them, but there is not much he can tell them.
"A story comes to me," he says. "I write it down. If a child dies in it, if a butterfly dies in it, it's a story. I write it down. It isn't illegal if you write a story and a child dies in it. Is it? I mean I'm not saying ... do you think I'm saying, to people `Kill a child'?"
The writer is, of course, a fictitious character, and this is a rehearsed reading of Martin McDonagh's play The Pillowman. But the fiction is not entirely invented. Like the imaginary writer, Martin McDonagh is young, just 26. Like him, he comes from an unknown place, one that in his case might be England or Ireland but is really both and neither. He, too, lives with his older brother, John, who is 49.
The stories the policemen read out are his own, some of the hundreds of stark, strange fables he wrote in his late teens and early 20s. And if you ask him to explain them, you get the same answer that his imaginary writer gives to his interrogators. Stories come to him. He writes them down. "You have to allow your own feelings to be true to the story," he says, "not the other way around."
The Pillowman was written before Martin McDonagh became famous, but it seems right that this play about a criminal investigation into a writer should see the light of the day just now, for there ought to be a law against success like his. The Beauty Queen Of Leenane won him five separate awards last year. Druid, in association with the Royal Court, is about to do him the unprecedented honour of reviving that play and presenting it alongside the two new plays with which it forms a trilogy, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West, to run for five weeks from June 3rd.
Already this year, Britain's Royal National Theatre has produced the first part of another trilogy, The Cripple Of Inishmaan, and has plans to do the other two parts over the next 18 months.
In recent weeks, two of America's most distinguished and least impressionable critics, Robert Brustein and John Lahr, have written glowing pieces about his work in, respectively, the New Republic and the New Yorker.
Last week he finished a film script ("It's kind of a Sam Peckinpahtype jaunt through the hills") commissioned for Paramount by producer Scott Rudin, whose previous credits include The Addams Family and The First Wives' Club.
Even when he made a show of himself at the dinner for the Laurence Olivier Awards last winter, he managed to do it with a certain epic grandeur, squaring up to no less a figure than 007 himself, Sean Connery.
And to make matters worse, he does not have the grace to pretend to be stunned by it all. His only concession to the required code of modesty is to say that he was surprised, not by his success, but by its timing. "I always imagined that good stuff would take 40 years to come to the surface, so I thought I would spend most of the rest of my life scrabbling around in a hovel. So it was really strange and fun that it was accepted so readily and so immediately.
That his stuff is good is a truth that he takes more or less for granted. Most writers find their self confidence rocked by rejection. His rejections by, among others, the Abbey, merely confirmed his faith in his own superior judgment. When, for instance, he sent some of his 22 radio plays to the BBC, and received a standard rejection form, it "gave me more self belief. I felt they were good, and just listening to the BBC's output at the time I realised they were much better than what was being accepted. That gives you some kind of perspective. If you don't care what they're saying about it when they reject it, then when they start saying it's brilliant you still take it with a little pinch of salt. I always felt and still do that my own opinion on the stuff was the most important."
Nor does he make much effort to play up to the accepted image of a child of the diaspora coming home. For the Irish in London, home thoughts from aunts and uncles all around. In the little block of 10 prefabs his family occupied abroad are supposed to fit a familiar mould. The sound of lapping lakewater heard on a grey pavement. The long, long way from Clare to Cricklewood. Many young men of 20 grown old and still promising to take their Cathleens home again. The melancholy allure of a lost paradise, where the sweet sorrow of parting will one day be transformed into the joy of homecoming.
Martin McDonagh, the son of a Sligo mother and a Galway father, grew up in this kind of London. He had Irish in Elephant and Castle there were five Irish families. It was a similar story when they moved down the road to Camberwell. He spent his summer holidays in Easkey and in Connemara. He became a choirboy in the Catholic parish church and imbibed the verities of Irish nationalism. Later, his parents moved back to Lettermullan in Connemara, and although he and his older brother John stayed behind in London, they spend a fair amount of time there.
But for him, there was none of the exile's longing, none of the proper nostalgic clutch of the ould sod. There was no "Irish community", just people who happened to be around the place. Sligo and Connemara were great, but they belonged more to the countryside than to a country. "It wasn't," he remembers, "much different from going to the seaside in England fields, cows, trees, what a joy!"
He felt "only slightly" Catholic. "I always had to go to Mass but then I stopped when I was about 15 or 16, just because it was a waste of an hour on a Sunday when you could be watching telly. I probably stopped going before I knew why, intellectually. But now I'm definitely not Catholic.
As for nationalism, he is emphatic: "I was never any sort of nationalist. It always struck me as kind of dumb, any kind of pride in the place you happen to be born in. Even culturally, I don't think you can take too much pride in what your predecessors in your country have written. If you haven't written it yourself, you're as close to it as an Eskimo. You hear people saying `We as in the Irish have got the greatest writers in the world'. When I hear that I want to ask `Did you write anything lately? What have you got to be proud of?"'
He was, and is, a citizen of an indefinite land that is neither Ireland nor England but that shares borders with both. "I always felt somewhere kind of in between, same way I do now. I felt half and half and neither, which is good, especially now. I'm happy having a foot in both camps. I'm not into any kind of definition, any kind of -ism, politically, socially, religiously, all that stuff. It's not that I don't think about those things, but I've come to a place where the ambiguities are more interesting than choosing a strict path and following it."
And yet, amid all the ambiguities there was, for him, a crucial Ireland. It was not a place or a faith or a community or even a family. It was not even, as you might expect from a young writer, a literary or theatrical culture: Synge or yeats, Joyce or Beckett. It was just a voice in the head, a way of talking.
HE left school when he was 16, having read, he says, very few books, but watched an awful lot of television and films. He didn't want to get a job "That's why I got into the writing in the first place, just to avoid having a real job" so he spent his days reading his brother's books finding, in the work of the Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, a strange, laconic style that appealed to him because he had no interest in writing the usual kind of confessional fiction that pours out of young writers.
"You just find yourself so boring that you have to find something else to talk about. I'm always more interested in, say, a fairytale than in an expression of angst, though I'll probably do something like that at some time. I've got bits and pieces of angst somewhere, though not so much lately."
After three years of doing very little, he tried writing screenplays. "Then it kind of developed into three or four films and a few TV plays but I kind of knew they were bad, a few months after I'd written them." He then got a part time job in the civil service for four hours a day, four days a week, leaving him plenty of time to write.
"I tried doing short stories to be made into short films. I wrote bunches and bunches of them because I hooked up with this videomaker and I wrote maybe a hundred, two hundred, and some of them were trash but some of them were really good." Some of these eventually found their way into The Pillowman, which was the third play he wrote, but the first he regarded as good.
Stage plays, though, were something of a last resort. "I always thought theatre was the least interesting of the art forms. I'd much rather sit at home and watch a good TV play or series than go to the theatre. I only used to go to see plays with film stars in them. I think the first play I ever saw, and still probably the best, was David Mamet's American Buffalo with Al Pacino when I was about IS. Then I saw Martin Sheen in something and Tim Roth. I could name every single play I've ever seen even now, because there's only about 19 or 20, and two of those are my own."
After he decided to write plays he thought he'd better read some, so he got hold of some texts by Mamet and Harold Pinter. His first two plays were heavily influenced by both of them, and the third, The Pillowman, still bears the traces. It was only in trying to get those American and English voices out of his head that he rediscovered Ireland. "I wanted to develop some kind of dialogue style as strange and heightened as those two, but twisted in some way so the influence wasn't as obvious. And then I sort of remembered the way my uncles spoke back in Galway, the structure of their sentences. I didn't think of it as structure, just as a kind of rhythm in the speech. And that seemed an interesting way to go, to try to do something with that language that wouldn't be English or American."
His Ireland, then, was a way of talking, and in discovering this country he found his voice. He sat down to write A Skull in Connemara and "as soon as I
started writing the first scene, I realised it was completely fresh for me and I wasn't harking back to anything I had seen or read. I can see similarities now I read The Playboy Of The Western World and the darkness of the story amazed me. I thought it would be one of those classics that you read in order to have read, rather than to enjoy, but it was great. At the time, though, I didn't know it at all."
In a short time, he wrote six plays. Each, he says, takes him an average of four to five weeks. "I don't think of it as quick, I usually try to write a set number of pages each day, probably not much more than three or four hours a day, which isn't an awful lot. But I try to do it every single day. Beauty Queen, I think, took just over a week. That's very fast but it didn't seem that way. There's eight or nine scenes, so if you write one scene a day, which I did, it wasn't too hard."
The speed, though, is also a kind of method. "When you write at speed you don't have time to hide anything. Stuff is going to come out which you don't even notice when you're writing anything you believe socially or politically will come through even though I try to avoid it as much as I can. My instinct is to always hide my social or political beliefs but it's natural for something to come out."
And yet, somehow, the vast productivity and the huge self confidence do not make for a monstrous ego. He does spend most of his time alone in his room, writing. He may know that he is a potentially great playwright, but he is not sure if that is, after all, such a great thing: "To be in this position is strange because I'm coming to theatre with a disrespect for it. I'm coming from a film fan's perspective on theatre." And there is a strange kind of humility behind the self belief the image of himself as a man to whom stories come, almost as if they did so of their own accord.
What drives him, he says, is the thought of bringing new stories into the world. "We're all here and we have our time on the earth. The Brothers Grimm had their time and they left these stories behind them. Leaving little things behind that nobody else could is much more interesting than saying things in general about human nature which most people can do if they try. I hope I can just continue with the stories rather than achieve some kind of position where you feel you have to say something."
