Martin Mcdonagh’s Darkly Comic Stage Plays and Their Links to ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’

The Banshees of Inisherin reunited Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson from Martin McDonagh’s first feature, In Bruges. McDonagh’s career has soared since that dark comedy crime caper debuted in 2008. It was clear when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, fittingly McDonagh’s third dark comedy, earned seven Academy Award nominations and secured acting statuettes for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell.

The Banshees of Inisherin went two better in January 2023 when it picked up seven nods at the 95th Academy Awards. MacDonagh’s fourth feature is his first set in Ireland and may seem familiar to viewers who’ve seen his stage work. In the theater, he has established an outstanding reputation as a playwright that precedes his filmmaking. In fact, there’s a very good reason that his latest tragicomic work fits his stage plays like a (probably bloody) glove.

McDonagh the playwright

McDonagh is consistently named among the greatest living playwrights. He established a formidable reputation as a playwright before he wrote and directed 2004’s Six Shooter. Naturally, that first step into cinema was a dark comedy featuring Gleeson. There was a hint of what would come when it won the Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short in 2006.  

As McDonagh moved into feature films, he continued penning plays, establishing a fascinating connection between his work on stage and screen that extends beyond locale and shared actors. It was in the theater that he established his reputation for absurd and darkly comical plays, influenced by giants of the stage like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter as much as legends of the screen Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch. His plays became known for their challenge to typical stage conventions, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that he’s admitted he’s fonder of film. In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, he didn’t mince words. “I’ve accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It’s too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.”

That may explain why the second of his Irish trilogies ended up not on stage, but on film in The Banshees of Inisherin.  While the film mines one of McDonagh’s typical tragicomic scenarios, it’s not as dark, bloody, and absurd as some of his theater work.  

The Leenane trilogy

This trilogy was McDonagh’s first Ireland-set series of plays. The Druid Theatre Company of Galway premiered The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996 before it transferred to Off-Broadway and Broadway in 1998. The house-set tale of a struggling daughter who sees one last chance for love while living with her overbearing mother was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play.

Next was A Skull in Connemara, which followed a pair of men exhuming skeletons in an overcrowded graveyard, only for one to meet the wife he was once accused of killing. Again premiering in Galway in 1997, it traveled to London’s Royal Court, Seattle, and Off-Broadway.

The Lonesome West closed the trilogy, continuing the exploration of family connections as it caught up with two squabbling brothers following what appeared to be their father’s accidental death. Its 1999 run on Broadway earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Play.