Word: mcdonagh
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...Martin McDonagh sits cross-legged on a bed, giving a visiting journalist the only comfortable chair in the ill-furnished brownstone apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side that has been the playwright's home for the past two months. A TV set, perched uncertainly on a table in the corner, flickers soundlessly. When not at rehearsals, the London native has been giving himself a crash course in American TV. Tops on his list of discoveries: South Park and the fights on Jerry Springer...
...forefront of the movement are McDonagh, 26; Patrick Marber, 32, whose play Closer is running at the National's small Cottesloe Theatre; and Mark Ravenhill, 31, whose controversial play Shopping and F______ is finishing a month-long run at the West End's Gielgud Theatre before heading to Edinburgh; it will be seen in New York City early next year. An earlier trilogy of McDonagh's opened this past weekend at the Duke of York's, which makes him the only writer this season, apart from Shakespeare, to have four plays running concurrently in London...
...ability to write beautifully about it, the three playwrights are very different. Marber, a Londoner who got his start on the comedy circuit performing stand-up and working with the popular television comedian Steve Coogan, crafts intricately layered, well-observed, heartfelt plays in a realistic vein about contemporary relationships. McDonagh is more a folkwriter in the tradition of J.M. Synge. His macabre, wildly funny and over-the-top tragicomedies are slightly absurdist, set in remote parts of rural Ireland and peopled with comic grotesques--or literal grotesques, like the title character in Cripple, whom a young actor, Ruaidhri Conroy, plays...
...many, McDonagh seems to have emerged from out of nowhere, for years leading the garret life, writing plays in isolation in the South London house he shared with his brother, until two theaters--the Royal Court and the Druid Theatre in Galway--finally showed an interest in his work. Much has been made in the British press about his never having lived for any length of time in the Ireland he writes about so critically and so lushly. The question of his national origin is something of a biographical crux: Is he Irish or English? Everyone wants to know...
Marber and McDonagh resist the suggestion that they are part of a literary movement: "That makes it sound as though we all know each other and sit around in cafes all day chatting," says Marber. In fact they barely know one another. What really seems to bind these playwrights together, from the perspective of an outsider, is the absence from their work of any overt political agenda. These are not issue or idea plays (like, say, David Hare's Plenty or Caryl Churchill's Top Girls), though they speak seriously to a contemporary audience and reflect the world their authors...