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Contemporary Theatre Review | 2006

How to stage globalisation? Martin McDonagh: An Irishman on TV

Catherine Rees

The body of work by enfant terrible playwright Martin McDonagh comprises tightly woven, brutally violent and blackly comic thrillers; plays with some formal affinities with familiar ‘potboilers’ of the popular Irish and British theatrical traditions that nevertheless confront audiences with visions of an Ireland unsettlingly stupid and shockingly savage. The ostensible setting for McDonagh’s five so-called ‘Irish’ plays (his latest play, The Pillowman will not be discussed here) is the Ireland of The Quiet Man: the gentle and mythical Emerald Isles, an Ireland constructed by theatrical and ideological myth – an Ireland of rustic perfection and naı̈ve idealism. McDonagh’s dramatic trademark is to rip apart this rural simplicity with family rivalry, sectarian violence and pointless feuds. This article seeks to locate the roots of this brutalism and to challenge the myth of rural naivety, placing Inishmaan, Inishmore and Leenane in the global market, a world shaped, not by local simplicity, but by global events, multinational companies and media construction. This article will also interrogate the question of national identity and ask whether nationalism, and indeed national drama, can remain meaningful within the spread of global economy and culture. Finally, if national history is eroded and becomes increasingly meaningless, what is the future, not just for national theatre, but for audiences and citizens? Martin McDonagh’s first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane was produced in 1996 to clamorous praise. Winning three writing awards and four Tonys, the play was commended and yet also criticised in equal measure. Set in ‘The living room/kitchen of a rural cottage in the west of Ireland’, the play begins with the familiar domesticity of kitchen-sink drama. The language is constructed around traditional Irish lyricism, with the use of the idiosyncratic ‘now’ at the end of the sentence and the 1. Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane in Plays One (London: Methuen, 1999), p. 53. All McDonagh references are taken from this Plays One edition unless otherwise indicated.


Archive | 2018

Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman and the Postmodern Gothic

Catherine Rees

Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) introduces his audiences to a new nightmarish phase in his work, using archetypal Gothic fairy tales to disturb and unsettle and to tap into a more unnerving depiction of violence and extremes of the theatrical grotesque. This chapter seeks to explore the discomforting effect of the ‘little stories’ within the play’s narrative from a postmodern perspective. In exploring the horror of these ‘little stories’, McDonagh is playfully exposing a postmodern preoccupation with fractured narrative as well as providing the audience with a renewed sense of power in the theatrical moment, whereby their engagement with and fear of the telling and enacting of ‘little’ stories’ becomes the focus of the play’s Gothic engagement.


Contemporary Theatre Review | 2012

Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today

Catherine Rees

the performance of gender – particularly in relation to the queer girl erotic movement of the mid-1990s and its different manifestations of appropriated, parodied, and intensely sexualised performative expressions in the United States; and one-third collection of four of Torr’s performance texts and a cheeky do-it-yourself guide to being a ‘man for a day’. Written in a clear, humorous, and intelligent dual voice, Torr and Bottoms’s collaboration is a moving document. The memoir section follows Torr’s trajectory from a childhood on the outskirts of Aberdeen, Scotland in the 1950s, where concepts of ‘femininity’ threatened how Torr perceived access into a male ‘world’, to forming an all-girl art-punk band DISBAND in New York City in the 1970s while making a living as a go-go dancer called ‘Tornado’, to discovering the work of Andrea Dworkin and Angela Carter (in particular the latter’s book The Sadeian Woman [1979]) and realising how the free play of sexuality and erotic sensibilities could generate new levels of performative exploration as the WOW Café flowered in New York City. Torr’s reflections do not intend to be a comprehensive survey of a particular era of drag king performance and street art actions, but offer rather a personal overview of passages of coming of age and an exploration of her politicisation as a citizen-artist at a time of serendipitous convergence: a time when other queer artists and drag performers were investigating prescribed heterosexual and homosexual, masculine and feminine roles post the Stonewall riots, preand post-AIDS in New York City, and in the context of a rise of LGBT communities as visible political voices. Bottoms’s keen scholarly eye and witty academic voice moves seamlessly into the subsequent chapter entitled ‘Applications’, which positions Torr’s work as artist and mentor/educator (through drag king workshops) alongside the performance work of US West and East Coast drag kings Shelley Mars, Chris Teen, Johnny Science, Tracy Blackmer (aka Buster Hymen) and Leslie Lowe; the evolution of drag king contests; the predominance of mainstream TV talk shows such as Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera, and Sally Jesse Raphael that featured interviews with cross-dressers and transsexuals; the emergence of dyke rock-and-roll bars in New York City and San Francisco; and the proliferation of self-initiated drag king troupes across North America. Bottoms’s breezy survey, which leans theoretically on Judith Halberstam’s 1998 study Female Masculinity, covers firstand second-generation drag kings and the cross-generational influences manifested in their performances in the club and contest world. The next sections of the chapter move into discussions of Torr’s Man for a Day workshops, her public performative actions as a member of the Guerrilla Girls collective of feminist art activists, and her travels to countries outside of the transatlantic queer English-dominant matrix, and concludes with a hopeful call to action for the future of transgender rights and the legacy that the enabling and empowering ‘early days’ of drag king feminist queer performance left behind. Sex, Drag, and Male Roles is a lively book aimed at both a general performance readership and a scholarly audience. It is most successful as a text that explores applicable practice rather than theory, and serves primarily as a reflective and illuminating memory piece for Diane Torr’s life’s work in performance and in gender transformation workshops with ordinary women. For a scholar looking to this book for an extensive theoretical exegesis on identity construction and gender subversion, this volume will perhaps be slightly disappointing, for Torr and Bottoms’s aim is more in the realm of the biographical. To that end, in some ways, the book feels incomplete, or better put: it left this reader aching for more about Torr’s formative years, adolescence and young adulthood, as constructions and reconstructions of gender, and more about the choices of role-play that emerged in Torr’s consciousness as choices that could be embodied. However, as a survey of Torr’s early career as artist and activist at a vital time and turning point in LGBT politics and performance in the USA, this is an invaluable document and one that hopefully will find wide readership.


Archive | 2017

Adaptation and Nation

Catherine Rees


Archive | 2016

The Plays of Harold Pinter

Andrew Wyllie; Catherine Rees


Archive | 2016

Pinter, Place and Psychogeography

Andrew Wyllie; Catherine Rees


Archive | 2016

Pinter, Gender and Sexuality

Andrew Wyllie; Catherine Rees


Archive | 2016

Pinter Off Stage: Radio, TV and Film

Andrew Wyllie; Catherine Rees


Archive | 2016

Pinter the Absurdist

Andrew Wyllie; Catherine Rees


Archive | 2016

Pinter and the Papers

Andrew Wyllie; Catherine Rees

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