A MIND IN CONNEMARA.(Martin McDonagh)(Biography)

As a child, the playwright Martin McDonagh spent nearly every summer with his parents and older brother in Connemara, a rugged region on Ireland's west coast. Once, when he was six, his family boarded a curragh--a long rowboat made of slatted wood, of the sort that local fishermen have used for almost two thousand years--and made the trip from Lettermullan, the Connemara fishing village where his father grew up, to the Aran Islands, ten miles off the coast. Being on the boat surrounded by so much empty sky and water terrified McDonagh, but at the same time he was exhilarated. The landscape "always stuck in my mind," he recalled. "Just the lunar quality, the remoteness, the wildness, the loneliness of it."

Oscar Wilde described Connemara as "wild mountainous country," "in every way magnificent," and both W. B. Yeats and John Millington Synge saw it as the repository of a simpler way of life, untainted by modern vulgarity. Robert Flaherty's 1934 documentary, "Man of Aran," portrayed the local fishermen as emblems of a timeless struggle for survival in a pitiless universe. And Lucky, in his deranged monologue in Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," laments that the region's rocky terrain seems to weigh on its human inhabitants: "the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara."

McDonagh has a less romantic conception of the place. At thirty-five, he is perhaps the most successful young playwright of the past decade--in 1997, he was widely described as the first dramatist since Shakespeare to have four works professionally produced on the London stage in a single season--and his plays, black comedies in which acts of extreme cruelty and violence are routine, are merciless rebukes to literary sentimentality. "The Cripple of Inishmaan," the first play in a loosely connected trilogy set in the Aran Islands, imagines the making of Flaherty's film and takes a sardonic view of the gap between the filmmaker's heroic imagery and the pettiness of the natives. The title of "The Lonesome West," which is part of another trilogy, this one set in the Connemara village of Leenane during the early nineteen-nineties, comes from a line in Synge's "The Playboy of the Western World": "There's sainted glory this day in the lonesome west." In McDonagh's play, Valene Connor, a neurotic bachelor, collects plastic figurines of Catholic saints, which are eventually melted in an oven by his brother, Coleman, who, shortly before the play begins, murders their father for making fun of his hair style. ("There's some insults that can never be excused," he explains.)

Another play in the Leenane trilogy, "A Skull in Connemara," turns Lucky's lament into a macabre joke: two men are hired by a priest to alleviate congestion in the parish graveyard by exhuming corpses and smashing their bones to pieces; one amuses himself with a pair of skulls, making them kiss each other and holding them up to his chest as if they were breasts. "Sure skulls are great oul things," he marvels. "It's hard to believe you have one of these on the inside of your head."

Populated by misfits and miscreants, McDonagh's Connemara is an amoral, anarchic place, where authority has crumbled; as Father Welsh, the hapless priest in "The Lonesome West," puts it, "It seems like God has no jurisdiction." In this world, an argument over potato chips or a disparaging remark about a pet cat can lead to murder and suicide. McDonagh's characters are not adults but, rather, overgrown children, who crave and rage and gloat. His plays--the two trilogies and a drama called "The Pillowman," all of which were conceived in 1994, when McDonagh was twenty-four--display the masterly mechanics of Georges Feydeau, the richly idiosyncratic dialogue of Synge, and the gallows humor of Joe Orton. But McDonagh is a different kind of playwright; he is bloody and outlandish, a storyteller whose appeal is primarily visceral. During the London run of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," the first play in the Leenane trilogy, audiences actually cried, "Stop! Don't do it!" as they watched Maureen, the play's long-suffering middle-aged protagonist, hold the hand of Mag, her mother, over a hot stove and douse it with boiling oil.

McDonagh himself is disconcertingly unassuming. One afternoon this winter, I met him at the Cruiscin Lan, a pub next to the harbor in Spiddal, the village in Connemara to which his parents retired, in 1992. McDonagh lives alone, in Limehouse, a trendy neighborhood in East London, in a flat overlooking the Thames which he bought with income from productions of his plays, and he spends a week each Christmas at his parents' house. McDonagh arrived at the pub in a car driven by his mother, a bright-eyed energetic sixty-year-old, who got out to shake my hand. "I would have walked down from the house, but Mum wanted ...