I know I owe you the
Misterman review from opening night, but I'd like to interrupt this regularly scheduled programming to bring you this terrific interview with Molly Ferguson, the new Professor of English and Women's Studies at Lindsey Wilson College. Molly and I share a love for Irish drama in general and Conor McPherson in the particular.
Dr. Ferguson is an Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at Lindsey Wilson College. She completed her PhD in English in May 2010 at the University of Connecticut, with a dissertation about ghost stories in contemporary Irish literature. She has published an essay on Roddy Doyle's short stories in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and has a forthcoming essay on Nuala NiDhomhnaill in
Women's Studies: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal. Her ongoing interests include postcolonial literature/theory, gender, trauma and humor in Irish and world literature.
Here are some of the thoughts Molly generously offered during her exam time too!
What generated your interest in Irish drama?
In 1998 I was studying abroad in Galway when I was offered free tickets to a showing of Conor McPherson's "This Lime Tree Bower". It was a stunning monologue-driven performance. When I returned to the States I saw "The Weir" in New York City off-Broadway, and that play was even more compelling and emotionally charged. After that, I sought to read plays by McPherson, Martin McDonagh, and Marina Carr, and became enthralled with the work contemporary dramatists were doing. My dissertation in graduate school emerged from the contrast I perceived between the abundance of the Celtic Tiger era and the dark work of Ireland's dramatists at the time.
Speaking of Martin McDonagh, so much of Irish drama takes place in the West of Ireland. Why do you think this is?
The West has been a source of imagination and mythology that has been foundational for the work of seminal authors like W.B. Yeats and John Millington Synge, who have influenced later generations of artists. One reason for this is that the rural West has retained a distinctive cultural identity, partially due to the presence of Gaeltachts (Irish-speaking enclaves). The region has produced complex responses by artists. Synge viewed the West as haunting, yet primitive on his visit to the Aran Islands, and Joyce's character Gretta in "The Dead" is representative of a peasant woman in touch with an elemental Irish identity. A potentially negative outcome has been a tendency to fix the West as an unchanged pastoral landscape, a view that has been exploded by recent artists.
McDonagh is described as one of the most skilled and brilliant creators of theatrical pot-boilers”and the Leenane trilogy “undoubtedly one of the great events of the contemporary Irish theatre." Do you think this is warranted?
I think the Leenane trilogy tapped into a strong desire to deconstruct the mythology of the West, as well as to take stock of Irish identity in a time of rapid change. It was the right set of plays at the right time, because it managed to thoroughly entertain audiences both within and outside of Ireland, while voicing the kinds of questions circulating Ireland about progress, urbanization and secularization. McDonagh's mastery of black comedy is tremendous, and he manages to create pathos in plays in which none of the characters are particularly sympathetic. McDonagh establishes the presence of death as a part of everyday life in rural Ireland and the hopelessness of the characters who feel left out of the economic party of the Celtic Tiger. I see much of that feeling folded into his film work, as well.
What, if any, macabre innovation do you see in McDonagh's work?
The Pillowman - On one hand, the play incorporates folk tradition, storytelling, and fairy tales as might be expected of an Irish playwright, yet McDonagh's play is horrifying, frightening and absurd in its depiction of child abuse and state terror mechanisms. This makes the play disturbingly modern and displaces it from the Ireland of the Leenane plays into a state that could exist anywhere in the global world. The title character, the goofy bogeyman made entirely out of pink pillows who comes to little children to convince them to commit suicide to avoid the horrible lives they are destined for, embodies both the soft comfort and smothering capabilities of the pillow. Every time an audience member might feel like he/she is watching something recognizable, the playwright includes a twist that radically challenges tradition, like re-writing the "Pied Piper" tale to make the Piper a child-murderer or staging a child's re-enactment of a crucifixion.
The Pillowman, my favorite of McDonagh's plays, is certainly cruel (and I wonder what that says about me). Do you think his plays in general reached a new level of violence?
I wouldn't say that McDonagh's plays are
more cruel or violent than previous Irish drama, but the intentionality behind the violence in a McDonagh play is what makes it "a new level," as you stated. In his drama, the people who commit violence are often sadistic and ferocious in their motivations behind the violence, and the type of violence depicted is more horrifying. I'm thinking, for example, of the vast difference between Sean O'Casey's political violence (gunshots and death scenes) in
The Plough and the Stars compared to a little girl re-enacting Jesus' crucifixion, dumb-show style, in
The Pillowman. McDonagh ups the ante emotionally every chance he gets, by depicting violence that is deeply disturbing to our sense of justice. Even more significant is that violent acts in his plays are often absurd, lending a smirk of irreverent humor to the acts themselves. (I haven't read or seen
A Behanding in Spokane, but I imagine it contains that irreverance.) So a straightforward killing or wounding onstage in another Irish play may be considered plot-driven, but McDonagh's violence can seem gratuitous for some audiences because he's laughing about it.
There's been plenty of academic discussion about the debt McDonagh owes to Synge. What do you think?
I definitely agree that both Synge's and McDonagh's characters undermine and even subvert the "noble peasant" trope. This subversion has gotten both of them in trouble - much of the anger behind the Playboy riots, for example, was over a rural girl like Pegeen going outside the expected role and seeking sexual fulfillment by "besporting" with Christy. Interestingly, it's Synge's women who often lead the way in rejecting "noble peasant" status, like Pegeen, the Widow Quin and Nora Burke in
In the Shadow of the Glen. Critiques of McDonagh's subversion of the rural Irish stereotype has seemed to originate in his not being considered "Irish enough" to manipulate those recognizable cultural figures. (Kind of the mentality that "I can make fun of my brother, but you'd better not!") At the time of the Leenane trilogy, the stereotype had already been dispelled by other writers and it's more like a reference point for audiences that he can work from.
Thank you, Dr. Molly!
