[p. 136] 

Charles Andrews

National Tragedy as Religion in Martin McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy

The dramatists of Yeats' generation turned nationalist theatre into a quasi-religion. They believed that a priest-like artist could arouse the dormant modes of transcendence diminished by years of colonial oppression. The theatre became something of a worship space with the Abbey as its high temple.

Theorists of nationalism have generally seen the nation replacing religion in modernity. According to Benedict Anderson, "the dawn of the age of nationalism…[coincides with]…the dusk of religious modes of thought."(1) Anderson argues that the post-Enlightenment world, "required…a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning…few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation."(2) This theory of the relationship between nation and religion, which we might refer to as the "replacement model," though it is widespread, does not seem to adequately describe the situation in Ireland. We might instead see nationalism and religion through an "interaction model," where both ideologies exert reciprocal forms of influence. Irish nationalism was fueled by various forms of religious belief—either in ancient Celtic supernaturalism or Catholic mythology—while at the same time the nation altered religious identities.

The urgency and transcendence of Yeats and Lady Gregory's theatre seems gone today, when the Abbey is known for solid, tourist-bait productions like The Importance of Being Earnest. The successful invigoration of Irish nationalism, subsequent autonomy, and current economic flourishing have left the Irish theatre less apparently religious.

However, I believe that religion may still be crucial to our understanding of dramatic production in Ireland. As a test case, I look to the work of Martin McDonagh which chronicles the life of the Western island in the early 1990’s, roughly ten years before its economic [p. 137] turnaround.(3)  In McDonagh's Galway we see nothing of the major construction projects and tourist centers that now suggest Galway's prosperity (and bid for acceptance in the global marketplace). Rather, his West is provincial, isolated, poor, and cruel. His characters tend towards lurid violence common in exploitation cinema, and they dream of immigration to a pop-consumerist America.

I concentrate upon The Leenane Trilogy (which includes The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West) where the primary representation of religion is Father Welsh/Walsh, a Catholic priest whose title has stability that his family name lacks. McDonagh has said that he doesn't really see Father Welsh as a priest but as "an ordinary man…a bloke."(4) But despite McDonagh's dismissal of Father Welsh's Christianity, his character displays the religious fetishization Graham Ward describes in True Religion, where "'religion' has become the commodified 'special effect'. Religion baptizes this fetishizing with the allure of a cheap transcendence."(5) The people in County Galway treat Welsh/Walsh with mild contempt in response to the special effect of his sacred title. His actions in the town, counseling murderers and potential murderers, are impotent and peripheral to the people's desires.

My contention in this paper is that McDonagh's trilogy depicts a struggle to remove the religious from mere fetishization, a struggle that is intimately linked with the national imaginary. To be a national subject in McDonagh's Ireland means being caught in a tragic situation, suffering from oppressive material conditions coupled with oppressive fantasies of transcendence. Father Welsh/Walsh becomes the embodiment of this tragedy and displays the interaction between national tragedy and religious belief.

McDonagh seems an unlikely inheritor of the spirit of the Irish Literary Revival. That early twentieth-century movement with luminaries like Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory was noted for its self-conscious aestheticization of nationalist politics. And, in the case of Yeats, it notably fell victim to Benjamin's adage that the aestheticization of politics is fascism. Rather than learning from the Irish dramatic tradition, McDonagh cites as his primary influences [p. 138] American pulp novels, the films of Terrence Malick, and punk bands like the Clash and the Pogues. He says, "I was always coming from a left-wing or pacifist or anarchist angle that started with punk, and which was against all nationalisms."(6)

Despite McDonagh's personal reservations about nationalism, critics have tended to focus on the violence and black humor of McDonagh's plays, recognizing his creation of a nationalist theatre to the exclusion of his interests in religion. Susanne Peters, for instance, argues that "McDonagh uses traditional themes and issues such as national stereotypes and idiomatic language…[to produce] a cautious return to human values, that is informed by irony, Kitsch, and surrealistic, fragmented forms of existence, grotesque experiences of everyday life."(7) This fragmentary (although possibly humanistic) world is for Fintan O'Toole an expression of McDonagh's precarious national identity. O'Toole, who has been McDonagh's leading critical champion, claims that the playwright "was, and is, a citizen of an indefinite land that is neither Ireland nor England, but that shares borders with both."(8)

Nationalism in McDonagh's trilogy is often discussed as a function of the local situation, of loyalty to the beautiful landscape and despair for the uncertain economic conditions. The world of his plays is marked by cruelty, violence, and poverty, as characters like Mag Folan and her daughter Maureen, the Dooley brothers, Hanlon brothers, and Connor brothers torture and kill each other under the guise of building better lives. In The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the first play in the trilogy, the would-be lovers Maureen Folan and Pato Dooley discuss the sending-off party for their American friends and Pato's impending return to London for work: 

Maureen: England? Aye. Do you not like it there so?
Pato: It's money […says he'll be returning…] It was only to see the Yanks off I was over. To say hello and say goodbye. No time back at all.
Maureen: That's Ireland, anyways. There's always someone leaving. {30}

[p. 139] From this dialogue we see that there are only two kinds of Irish people: those who are leaving Ireland and those who want to leave. McDonagh's situation, as O'Toole describes it, is similar to Pato's, caught between two lands in a simultaneous identification with and rejection of both England and Ireland. Against his best intentions, Pato's oscillation between Ireland and England along with his desire for America become crucial to his identity and shape even his most intimate relationships. At the end of Beauty Queen, Pato gets engaged to Dolores Hooley and leaves for America, while Maureen drifts into psychosis which includes matricide and a hallucination of going with Pato to Boston—the city of the Kennedys. She says: "Better than England it'll be, I'm sure…The Yanks do love the Irish"{70}. McDonagh's characters are painfully aware of their national identity, and their discussions of Irishness display contempt for local economic hardship and inferiority to the rest of the English-speaking world.

The desire for flight and temptations toward drink and violence which constitute national identity seep into the official Christianity of the town. In the character of Father Welsh, we see how the struggle to maintain allegiance to a Catholic vocation becomes vexed by national context. The priest is 35 and serving his first parish in Leenane, county Galway, and he finds himself adopting the less desirable qualities of his parishioners: exasperated outbursts of violence and a needling thirst for poteen. In Beauty Queen, Mag Folan and Ray Dooley discuss the priest:

Ray: Oul Father Welsh—Walsh—has a car he's selling, but I'd look a poof buying a car off a priest.  
Mag: I don't like Father Walsh—Welsh—at all.
Ray: He punched Mairtin Hanlon in the head once, and for no reason.
Mag: God love us!
Ray: Aye. Although, now, that was out of character for Father Welsh. Father Welsh seldom uses violence, same as most young priests. It's usually only the older priests go punching you in the head. I don't know why. I suppose it's the way they were brought up.
Mag: There was a priest in the news Wednesday had a babby with a Yank!
Ray: That's no news at all. That's everyday. It'd be hard to find a priest who hasn't had a babby with a Yank. If he'd punched that babby in the head, that'd be news…{15}

[p. 140] In the town of Leenane, no one is easily shocked. Casual discussions of violence fill the plays, but characters are more upset by minor injustice or personal grievance, like Mairtin being punched for "no reason," than by news of manslaughter, murder, or suicide.

In McDonagh's theatre, no overtly nationalist narrative provides meaning, as opposed to plays like Yeats's Cathleen Ni Houlihan. And the minimal benefits of religious community are fleeting. Mick Dowd teases Maryjohnny Rafferty in A Skull in Connemara about her weekly need for confession. Mary prefers the previous priest, Father Cafferty, over Father Welsh because of his youth:

Mick: Nothing the matter with Father Welsh.
Mary: Nothing the matter at all, except I don't too much like going to confession with a gasur aged two!
Mick: What the hell sins do you have to confess to him every week anyways?  And then playing with her:
Mick: What would it be, now? It wouldn't be impure thoughts? Ah no. It must be 'Thou shalt not steal' so.
Mary: How, 'Thou shalt not steal'?
Mick: Oh, cadging off the Yanks a pound a throw the maps the Tourist Board asked you to give them for free. Telling them your Liam's place was where The Quiet Man was filmed, when wasn't it a hundred miles away in Ma'am Cross or somewhere? {91-92}

Mary never lets on what exactly she confesses each week, although Mick continues to list her sins: selling John Wayne photos and mugs purportedly touched by Maureen O'Hara, cheating at church bingo, pilfering Mick's poteen. Shilling "authentic" Irish culture to American tourists is as close as the characters get to self-aware nationalism. And the Catholic confessional is used as a palliative for a million minor infractions rather than the soul-destroying secrets many of them carry. The crucial dramatic question which propels A Skull in Connemara is "did Mick Dowd kill his wife, or was it a drunk driving accident like he claims?" Confession is essential to this problem, because only Mick is alive to tell, and the local policeman Thomas Hanlon seeks retribution, glory, and (possibly) justice in extracting the truth from Mick.

[p. 141] Many signs of Christianity in McDonagh's Ireland are present in the social make-up, but their functions as spiritual, religious, or moral aides are virtually nonexistent. In the Folan cottage, a crucifix hangs beside a framed picture of John and Robert Kennedy, which suggests that a culturally determined religiosity may be equivalent to an inherited nationalism. Two fetish objects—the crucifix and the glossy photo of American royalty—exist side by side. In The Lonesome West, the brothers Valene and Coleman Connor keep "a double-barrelled shotgun and above that a large crucifix" next to a shelf where Valene displays "a long row of dusty, plastic Catholic figurines, each marked with a black 'V'"{169}. Whereas the set for the Folans' house in Beauty Queen explicitly links a desire for national celebrity with vestigial Catholicism, the Connors' house foreshadows the violence that arises in the midst of Catholic kitsch.

Valene's plastic figurines of the saints, watched over as they are by both a crucifix and a shotgun, exemplify the "allure of cheap transcendence" that Ward describes as the modern religious condition. For Valene, these plastic pieces are far more valuable than any of the spiritual virtues the saints represent. As the tension mounts between the two brothers because of their complicity in patricide, Coleman retaliates by melting Valene's statuettes in their oven. Father Welsh attempts to mediate:

Welsh: Tell me you didn't shoot your dad on purpose, Coleman. Please, now…
Valene: This isn't about our fecking dad! This is about me fecking figurines!
Coleman: Do you see this fella's priorities?
Valene: Melting figurines is against God outright!
Welsh: So is shooting your dad in the head, sure!{206}

The tragedy of the patricide that Coleman commits with Valene as his accomplice is far less important to the men than the destruction of the religious fetish object. These figurines are signs of Irish Catholic culture which displace more important social values. Father Welsh's position in this exchange is to destroy the religious fetishism in order to emphasize humanistic virtue.

That humanism, which exists as the core virtue in the Connors' religious fetishism, is finally exposed by Father Welsh's death. The priest commits suicide, which is both an expression of his despair at his failed vocation and an extravagant gesture at saving his lost [p. 142] flock. McDonagh has said that he was always most interested in the idea of a "suicidal Christ,"(9) but I think we might also interpret Welsh's gesture as a realization of St. Paul's statement in his letter to the Romans: "I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people."(10) The dramatic action of the final scene in The Lonesome West emanates from a single question: will Valene and Coleman permanently reconcile because of Father Welsh's suicide, his risking being "cut off from Christ," or will they return to animosity, competition, and violence? For much of the scene, the brothers borrow a Catholic ritual (minus a living priest, of course), and offer confession and forgiveness. Coleman admits that he drinks Valene's poteen and adds water to replace it. Valene admits that he shoved Coleman's love interest, Alison O'Hoolihan, on the playground so that the pencil she was sucking on "got stuck in her tonsils on her, and be the time she got out of hospital she was engaged to the doctor who wrenched it out for her"{247}. Coleman then admits that it was he, not Mairtin Hanlon, who snipped the ears off of Valene's dog. At that, the service of confession and forgiveness ends, and the brothers turn on each other, one with a butcher's knife, the other with the shotgun. After destroying their possessions and nearly killing each other, Coleman runs off in exhilarated terror while Valene stops to ponder Father Welsh's suicide note which begs the brothers to stop fighting, for the sake of his eternal soul. He begins to burn the suicide note, saying "Do I need your soul hovering o'er me the rest of me fecking life?" but he quickly extinguishes the flames, proclaims "I'm too fecking kind-hearted is my fecking trouble" and returns the suicide note to the wall next to the crucifix {258}. Thus, the ending of the play is predominantly tragic—it appears that the brothers will continue to wallow in their shallow feuds. But there are notes of comedy and the potential that Father Welsh's work is not entirely futile. Something of the social value of his Christianity remains intact even though his letter is added to the Connors' wall of Christian kitsch. 

In McDonagh's plays, religion is a national commodity and national tragedy becomes something like a religion—giving definition to peoples' lives, or, in Anderson's terms, turning "contingency into meaning." National and religious ideologies may be dysfunctional in Leenane, [p. 143] but the fading light which lingers on the dead priest's living words suggests that their potential transcendence is anything but cheap.

Endnotes

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991) 11.
2. Anderson 11.
3. All quotations from the trilogy come from Martin McDonagh, The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1998).  All quotations from the play are cited in parentheses throughout the essay.
4. This quote is from an interview with Fintan O'Toole in Bomb (Spring 1998), 67.
5. Graham Ward, True Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) ix.
6. See O'Toole 42.
7. See Susanne Peters, "The Anglo-Irish Playwright Martin McDonagh: Postmodernist Zeitgeist as Cliché and a (Re)Turn to the Voice of Common Sense" in Beyond Postmodernism: reassessments in literature, theory, and culture (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003) 292.
8. O'Toole is quoted in Steven Price, "Martin McDonagh: A Staged Irishman" Cycnos 18 (2001):  110.
9. O'Toole, 68.
10. NRSV Romans 9:2-3.