Low lie the Fields of Peckham Rye: Martin McDonagh and the London Irish

Martin McDonagh has recently seen a resurgence in interest in his earlier work on Dublin, Belfast, and London stages. The Irish premiere of Hangmen took place at the Gaiety in March, and a new production of The Pillowman featuring Lily Allen is currently running in the West End. Meanwhile, in Belfast his first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, recently finished its first major revival in the North of Ireland. The last of these belongs to that small corpus of McDonagh’s ‘Irish’ plays.

Now, the air quotes are the thing here.

Watching Emma Jordan’s staging of Beauty Queen, I was struck by just how London Irish it is. McDonagh expertly builds comic tension through riffing on a kind of chameleonised ventriloquism of borrowed voices, but the play’s rhythms are infused with another London influence - perhaps unwittingly - that is older still. The rat-a-tat music hall chutzpah of two great Jewish dramatists, David Mamet and Harold Pinter (who sound like they should be a vaudevillean double act) is also present, if in a disguised form. Pinter, whose Hackney childhood swam in linguistic double-talk and used non-sequiturs as a means of deflection to avoid violence at the hands of Mosley’s blackshirts, influenced Mamet, and both influenced McDonagh. The Hiberno-English of the play could be more accurately described as Hiberno-Cockney.

I was thinking about these lexical calibrations during the matinee I saw, following an article I’d recently read about McDonagh. Mark O’Connell’s takedown of him for Slate (Blarney: The Banshees of Inisherin and the put-on Irishness of Martin McDonagh), savaged McDonagh for his supposed inauthenticity. Whilst O’Connell’s take on Banshees is fair enough, I take issue with his questioning of McDonagh as an Irish writer at all. As a London-Irish playwright myself, and having lived and had work produced in London, Belfast and Dublin, I’ve encountered this perspective regarding ‘authenticity’ before, and the class bias that often underpins it. In addressing McDonagh’s ‘put-on Irishness’, O’Connell invokes Joyce’s symbol of Irish art, the cracked looking-glass of a servant, in reference to McDonagh’s alleged appropriation of a culture not his own, slighting not just its supposed inauthenticity, but the Irishness of the voice itself. Sitting in the auditorium I wondered if O’Connell was alert to the stratified layering of influences in the play, and just how deeply class factored into it.

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London Irish is a distinct cultural identity, especially as expressed through the sensibility of second-generation Irish artists that partly comprise it. Beauty Queen is a diaspora story that could have only been written by someone who is second-generation, working, as Graham Whybrow - the literary manager of the Royal Court noted at the time of its first production in 1997- ‘both within a tradition and against a mythology’. Whilst it lacks the psychological acuity of Tom Murphy’s cavalcade of great émigré dramas, it is as authentic - but its authenticity is of borrowed things.

It’s a palimpsest, where the claustrophobia of women in cramped kitchenettes in the Elephant & Castle overlays an image of women trapped in the rural Irish kitchens they left behind. Its authenticity is in the toggle between conditional identities, and between different registers of voice, inflection, accent. Of course, it’s mimicry, but only in the sense that Aristotle meant of mimesis being the imitation of an action. And talking is action when the active voice is a performative channelling of riotous energies. This is what I recognised on stage, like an x-ray that lay behind the play itself - a state that Marianne Hirsch terms ‘postmemory’. Tony Murray, in his seminal 2012 study, London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity, defines postmemory as ‘the experience of growing up under the influence of one’s parents’ or grandparents’ testimonies … mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.’

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In his 1999 memoir, The Falling Angels, the second-generation Irish journalist John Walsh writes of how he ‘writhed with Englishness’ at the disapproval of a roomful of émigré aunts in Battersea, feeling ‘adenoidal, stuffy and slow beside their quicksilver, allusive chat’. That cultural cringe of accent is one you quickly learn to navigate, and the second-generation London Irish accent is part imitation, part self-mockery, part homage. You can hear flight in it; a simultaneous leaning towards the mythic homeland and a holding back from it for fear of rejection, like immigration in reverse - what Edna O’Brien describes as ‘the dread of psychological choke’.

The diasporic experience is layered and nuanced, and how identity is created - any identity - is an amalgam of inheritance, environment, invention and self-creation; but also a certain distortion. This distortion, I’d argue, is often where the interesting stuff happens, in the imaginative recreation of an experience not directly your own but still belonging to you in some indefinable way.

So, on one level, The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a searing black comedy about bedpans, Complan and plunging arthritic hands into vats of burning oil; a blistering story of two women going at it like Baby Jane. On another, it’s about wanting and not getting, the hallucinatory intensity of rural isolation, and the poison of hope when ambition is thwarted. Like an old-fashioned melodrama, the plot turns crucially on an undelivered letter, with violent and calamitous results. I suspect McDonagh, like me, watched a lot of Bette Davis being unhinged in afternoon potboilers on Channel 4 in the early nineties. However, Davis’s thrilling psychopathy is just one of the galvanising energies that feeds the play. Mamet and Pinter, the violent horse operas of Sam Peckinpah, the linguistic wildness of Synge, and the compelling banality of Australian daytime soaps also got baked in. And yet, none of this is derivative. It’s that very working-class thing of self-mythologising until the right fusion of identity is constructed, transforming it into something new, something vital, something other, because self-invention is a rope ladder out.

To grow up London Irish in the early nineties was a shiftless, dislocating experience. For me, it was to carry localised myths in my head about mythic uncles and rogue aunts from Leitrim and Westmeath, on the number 8 bus up Willesden High Road in my London Underground uniform. Or to dip into The Case is Altered to watch the All-Ireland in county colours, squeezing in between the serried terrace of plastic chairs set out for the occasion. Or to slip into The Crown for an afternoon pint with my cousins on Saturday, as groups formed fierce little enclaves of whichever parish they hailed from. Or to be sneered at by the same cousins when Nick Cave screamed ‘Release the Bats!’ from the turntable you hoped would convert them to the violent ejaculations of The Birthday Party.

‘Jesus, what’s that now, voodoo?’

It was to be inside and outside at the same time, the Paddy in the street and the Englishman in the house. Or to wait on Cricklewood Broadway at 6am on a Monday for an unseen ganger to bark from the back of a van if you were looking for the start. It was to merge the twin vitalities of The Pogues and The Fall in your blood. You could always tell the second-generation kids because they knew all the words to The Fields of Athenry and Kicker Conspiracy.

Music was tribal, identifying.

In the play, Pato is heard singing the opening lines of The Body of an American, MacGowan’s totemic diasporic anthem, and McDonagh’s work is threaded through with such touchstones. Some are buried deep in the cultural id of his generation, passed down by fathers and mothers smarting from the prejudice they’d endured on building sites or cleaning offices. This enlarged into a mental map of nationhood complete with identifiable signposts; an inflated republicanism amplified and concentrated by distance - and fuelled by such injustices as the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six convictions, and chilling tales of the hanging of James Hanratty, the contested A6 murderer - an inspiration for a later McDonagh play, 2015′s Hangmen.

Other signifiers are more occult, more playful.

When the two hitmen of In Bruges check into a hotel under assumed identities, they give Blakely and Cranham as their cover names. Colin Blakely and Kenneth Cranham were the actors playing Gus and Ben in Richard Eyre’s BBC production of The Dumb Waiter, aired for one night in 1985, when Pinter’s play was part of the drama ‘O’ level curriculum. McDonagh would have been 15 at the time, the same age as me. But Pinter is here absorbed and transformed, so when that south London energy hits the salt air of Connemara it alchemises into something else, filtered through myriad pop-cultural influences and becoming a new linguistic force.

Tom Murphy, when he came to London in the 1960s and saw the Berliner Ensemble at the Royal Court, was similarly affected by a crosstalk of different cultures, of European radicalism infused with British iconoclasm. Brian Friel had a similar damascene moment in America, working with Tyrone Guthrie, as did Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney, working with Joan Littlewood at Stratford East. Drama is revitalised by such mongrelisation. It’s theatre’s vitality, its lifeblood. Being second-generation allows distance, observation, distortion.

When critics accuse McDonagh of paddywhackery they miss the point. In Beauty Queen the authenticity of the voice is in its distortion, in its want, in the desire for elsewhere and the simultaneous realisation that elsewhere is just a place where the deeper displacement of internal exile can be mapped out. As for Joyce’s metaphor for representation and illusion? Well, the history of drama is a perennial hall of mirrors: Hamlet holds his mirror up to nature only to have Brecht smash it. And the cracked looking-glass of a servant is still a looking-glass. It still reflects. What it reflects depends entirely on the angle you’re looking at it from.

Darren Murphy is a Belfast-based playwright who has been produced in the West End, Off-Broadway, Dublin, Derry, and Edinburgh.