Comedy of (T)Erros - Martin McDonagh’s Terrorizing Violence

43108

McDonagh aims to shock and disgust the audience from a pessimistic viewpoint of the contemporary English theatre. He plots his plays to this end, thus using the elements of violence, language of violence and themes of violence. Writing such plays, the writer moves on to the stages as an Irish-born English playwright and manages to attract attention on the English stages in the 1990s. He chooses the Irish countryside for the setting of his plays. He deals with terrorism, which is commonly experienced almost in the whole world in general and in Ireland in particular, in The Lieutenant of Inishmore in which terror is satirized with black humour indeed through disturbingly complicated and rather bloody scenes. McDonagh puts in the centre of the play the terrorist organizations, such as IRA and INLA which are labelled as heroes on the way to the independence and freedom of Ireland, and the terrorists who find themselves authorized to act and behave the way they like to. He also emphasizes that violence is applied in each level of the society and that those who start with the discourse of peace undergo a change in their characters through really dark and complicated relationships. Thus, McDonagh draws attention to the way(s) in which Ireland was liberated and to the people by whom this process was carried out.

185

Violence , society , terror , Ireland

Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences

196

Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences