English, Irish, both, neither: diaspora and New Interculturalism in Martin McDonagh's plays and films

Abstract

Martin McDonagh - whose notable works include plays The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Cripple of Inishmaan and films In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin is one of the most written-about playwrights and filmmakers of his generation. Yet the overwhelming majority of this criticism frames him as simply Irish or while criticising his supposed endorsement of stage-Irish stereotypes - as simply English.

Raised in London by Irish parents, he is in truth Irish, English, both and neither. While scholars have frequently gestured towards his membership of the Irish diaspora, my project examines this in depth, using his diasporic status simultaneous insider and outsider as a tool of analysis for his work. McDonagh's hybrid nationality complicates and makes ambiguous the traditional binary power divisions between Britain and Ireland: instead of conforming to this binary, his work exists in what New Interculturalism scholar Ric Knowles calls "the contested, unsettling, and often unequal spaces between cultures" (2010, p. 4).

New Interculturalism is a critical approach concerned with these in-between spaces, with hybrid identities and the power dynamics at play in cultural exchange. Applying this to McDonagh's plays and films illuminates an ongoing negotiation with the Irish theatre tradition (Synge, Gregory, O'Casey, Beckett, Tom Murphy), English culture (from Harold Pinter to Coronation Street), and American theatre and cinema (including David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino). He particularly revisits and interrogates works from the Irish diaspora, including John Ford's The Quiet Man, Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Flannery O'Connor's stories.

McDonagh's thematic interest in intercultural relations - in authenticity and representation after the seismic interruptions of colonialism and migration, in the impossibility of repressing or containing supposed impurities is made practical in his own alchemic collage of disparate influences.