Martin Faranan McDonagh ( mək-DON-ə; born 26 March 1970) is a British-born Irish playwright and filmmaker. Known for his absurdist dark humour and provocative style, he has received numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, six BAFTAs, two Golden Globes, and three Laurence Olivier Awards in addition to nominations for five Tony Awards.
His plays, many of which have been produced in the West End and on Broadway, include The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan (both 1996), The Lonesome West (1997), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), The Pillowman (2003), A Behanding in Spokane (2010), and Hangmen (2015). Some theatres have refused McDonagh's plays due to "unpalatable language".
McDonagh won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for Six Shooter (2004) and has received six other Academy Award nominations for his work on In Bruges (2008), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). He directed the black comedy film Seven Psychopaths (2012) and was executive producer on his brother John Michael's films The Second Death (2000) and The Guard (2011).
McDonagh was born on 26 March 1970 in Camberwell, London, to Irish parents. His mother (originally from Killeenduff, Easky, County Sligo) and his father (originally from Leitir Mealláin, Connemara, County Galway) moved back to Galway in 1992, but McDonagh and his brother (writer-director John Michael McDonagh) stayed in London.
In 1999, McDonagh was one of the recipients of the fifth Europe Prize Theatrical Realities awarded to the Royal Court Theatre (with Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Jez Butterworth, and Conor McPherson).
Separated into two trilogies, McDonagh's first six plays are located in and around County Galway, where he spent his holidays as a child. McDonagh's first play trilogy is set in Leenane, a small village on the west coast of Ireland. The trilogy starts off with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which is the story of the dysfunctional relationship between a spinster and her domineering mother, during the course of which the former faces her last chance at love, and the latter faces a rather grim end. The play was well received on its opening night in Galway in 1996 and was next produced off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in 1998. The play transferred to Broadway in April 1998 and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play.
The second part of the trilogy, A Skull in Connemara, involves a Connemara man who is employed to exhume skeletons in an overcrowded graveyard and he encounters the wife whom he was once accused of killing. The play premiered in 1997 at Town Hall Theatre, Galway. The play was presented at the Royal Court Theatre (London), and made its US premiere at the A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) in Seattle, Washington in July to August 2000. The play ran off-Broadway from January to May 2001 at the Gramercy Theatre, produced by the Roundabout Theatre.
The final part is titled The Lonesome West, a play involving two brothers bickering in the aftermath of the supposedly accidental fatal shooting of their father. The play ran on Broadway in 1999 and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play in 1999.
McDonagh's second trilogy is set across the Aran Islands, off the coast of County Galway. The first, The Cripple of Inishmaan, is a dark comedy in which a crippled teenager schemes to attain a role in Man of Aran. The play opened in 1997 at the Royal National Theatre (Cottesloe) in London. It opened in April 1998 Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, with Ruaidhri Conroy in the title role on both occasions. Also in 1998, Frederick Koehler played the title role in the Geffen Playhouse production in Los Angeles, California. In December 2008, The Cripple of Inishmaan was produced Off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company, in conjunction with The Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland.
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is the followup play which was written as a response to the 1993 Warrington bombings when two children were killed by the IRA. It is a dark comedy in which the insane leader of an INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) splinter group discovers that his best friend, a cat, has been killed. The play was produced Off-Broadway in February 2006 by the Atlantic Theater Company. It transferred to Broadway in May 2006 and received a 2006 Tony Award nomination for Best Play.
The Banshees of Inisheer, the third play of the trilogy, was never produced or published, as McDonagh insisted it "isn't any good", though he expressed a desire to return to it when he is older. In 2022, McDonagh directed a film titled The Banshees of Inisherin. The screenplay's resemblance to the play is unclear. The film's screenplay was published in 2022.
McDonagh also penned two prize-winning radio plays, one of which is The Tale of the Wolf and the Woodcutter.
McDonagh's first non-Irish play, The Pillowman, premiered at the Royal National Theatre in 2003, after a reading at the Finborough Theatre in 1995. In the play, a writer in a non-specified totalitarian state is interrogated over the content of several of his Brothers Grimm-style short stories. The play was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2004 and received a 2005 Tony Award nomination for Best Play.
In February 2010, an announcement revealed that McDonagh was working on a new stage musical with composer Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson.
A Behanding in Spokane is McDonagh's first play that is set in the United States and it premiered on Broadway in March 2010. Lead actor Christopher Walken was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance as a killer named Carmichael who has been looking for the left hand he lost in his youth for a quarter of a century. The play was nominated for the 2010 Drama League Award for Distinguished Production of a Play.
McDonagh's play Hangmen premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in September 2015. It follows Harry Wade, England's second-best hangman, after the abolition of hanging in Great Britain in 1965. The play was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2016. In 2020, Hangmen briefly premiered on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre starring Mark Addy and Dan Stevens before being shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The play returned on Broadway in 2022 this time with David Threlfall and Alfie Allen. The play received critical acclaim from critics including from The New York Times theatre critic Jesse Green who wrote, "[Hangmen] feels like a perfect fit for our unjust times".
McDonagh's play A Very Very Very Dark Matter is set in a townhouse in Copenhagen that reveals the dark source of the tales of children's author Hans Christian Andersen, as well as of the writer Charles Dickens. It premiered at the Bridge Theatre, London in October 2018.
McDonagh has stated that he prefers writing films to plays, as he holds a "respect for the whole history of films and a slight disrespect for theatre." In a 1998 conversation with Irish drama critic Fintan O'Toole in BOMB magazine, McDonagh further explained,