'Cripple of Inishmaan' - another triumph for Martin McDonagh

Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's 1997 play "The Cripple of Inishmaan" has received a rave review from The New York Times - and after a three-month run, the play closes this week.

A co-production between Ireland's Druid Theatre Company and New York's Atlantic Theatre, the show is directed by Tony Award winning Irish director Garry Hynes. It presents a pitch-black lampoon of Irish rural life, which it skewers relentlessly for two hours.

"We originally premiered Martin's work back in the 1990s with 'The Beauty Queen of Leenane,'" Hynes told IrishCentral.

"We followed that up with two other plays, 'The Lonesome West' and 'A Skull In Connemara' - and they soon became known as the Leenane trilogy.

"Martin and I had been talking about a new production of 'The Cripple of Inishmaan' in New York for some time and he wanted it done but wanted it done in a particular way. So we decided to make a co-production of it between Druid and Atlantic."

With the help of a unique agreement between American actors equity and Irish actors equity - where both sets of Irish and American actors performed together in Ireland and here in the U.S - Hynes managed to put together the first-ever full co-production between an Irish and an American company.

Hynes originally discovered McDonagh as a fledgling playwright, and she was the first to produce and direct his scripts onstage.

Their relationship has deepened over the past decade as the awards and plaudits rolled in. Has this success changed him?

"I would say essentially it hasn't changed him," says Hynes. "In his twenties he was literally holed up in his bedroom writing these plays for two years and had never even been to the theater much. He had certainly never seen a production of his plays.

"But he then became one of the most outstandingly successful writers in the English language in a very short space of time - and that process changes you to some degree - but his essence is the same. His skill as a dramatist and as a man of the theater was evident from the very beginning."

Playwright McDonagh, 38, is having a great year.

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Nster.com