Selected Recordings 2000 - 2010 by Olaf Tyaransen

Author:Olaf Tyaransen [Tyaransen, Olaf]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 0955341965
Published: 2011-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

{May, 2010}

CHAPTER TWELVE

Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh wants you all to know about New York indie rockers The Walkmen. “It’s the only reason I agreed to do this interview,” the 38-year-old playwright and film director chuckles, pulling up a seat in the reception area of Galway’s plush House Hotel. “I just wanted to give my favourite band a plug in Hot Press.”

Hopefully, he’s also planning to talk about the new Druid production of his play The Cripple Of Inishmaan – a typically dark, and occasionally savage, tragicomedy which imagines the reactions of petty and insular Aran Islanders to the filming of Robert Flaherty’s 1934 movie Man of Aran – but I tell him to go ahead.

“Have you heard of The Walkmen?” he asks, in his strong London accent. “I used one of their songs in In Bruges. They’re this really great American band, who’ve got four or five albums out now. I seriously think they’re one of the best things out there. They’re a lot more intelligent, but kind of have the same sound as a Strokes-like outfit. But somehow they’re totally obscure. I don’t know why. Maybe because they’re more poetic than The Strokes.”

Anybody else you’d like to big up while you’re at it?

“Actually, yeah, there’s another good guy called Micah Hinson. I saw him at the Electric Picnic, and I’ve seen him a bunch of other times. His first album, Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress, was really great.”

Although famously prickly, McDonagh seems to be in very good form tonight. During the pre-interview photo shoot in the hotel bar, a couple sitting nearby asked the tall, silver-haired and handsome writer if he was someone famous. “Nah, I’m just a wannabe,” he deadpanned. Needless to say, McDonagh hasn’t been a wannabe for well over a decade. The last time we met was back in 1996, around the time his controversial first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was wowing audiences both here and in London, and critics were dubbing him “the Tarantino of theatre.”

People were predicting great things for the young London-born Irishman, pretty much all of which have come to pass. At 25, McDonagh (who’d dropped out of school aged 16) already had six other plays written and ready to go. Two more scripts made up what became known as ‘The Leenane Trilogy’, there was another trilogy set on the Aran Islands, and also a dark and twisted Orwellian piece entitled The Pillowman.

Over the course of the past 12 years, all seven of these plays have been repeatedly produced, acclaimed, damned, and enjoyed by audiences all over the globe. In 1997, McDonagh had four works professionally produced on the London stage in a single season. The hysteria surrounding his rapid success was such that he was frequently touted as being the first dramatist since William Shakespeare to do so. He’s won more awards than he can probably even count. His first foray into movies – a short film called Six Shooter starring Brendan Gleeson – earned him an Oscar in 2006.

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