The English poet John Masefield read the manuscript of JM Synge’s book on the Aran Islands before it was published in 1907 and told playwright Lady Gregory that while he thought it uniquely good, “I am afraid its publication will send scores of tweeded beasts to the islands, but that cannot be helped.”
The beasts visiting Ireland’s offshore islands are no longer wearing tweeds, but those who promote the islands as tourist destinations are hoping the success of Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, filmed on Inis Mór and Achill Island, and winner this week of three Golden Globe awards, will create a new wave of visitors.
Amid the acclaim for the film, its director and cast, there will be much focus on the glamour and profile of the awards season and the potential bounty and pride that comes with international focus on Irish actors and the west of Ireland. It is less easy to figure out how to make sense of McDonagh’s representations of the west or what literature professor Nicholas Grene refers to as his “interventions in the history of Irish self-representation”. McDonagh is the keeper of a long-burning flame of the dramatisation of marginalised communities in remote western locations and, like the efforts of his predecessors, his work has always raised uncomfortable questions about these depictions.
After Synge’s death in 1909 WB Yeats suggested Synge’s time on the islands had made it clear he loved “all that had edge, all that is salt in the mouth, all that is rough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contest, all that stings into life the sense of tragedy”. McDonagh, it appears, also loves those things, and Synge’s name has been invoked in reviews of the film, as it has been at various stages of McDonagh’s playwriting career, but he manages to take tensions to a new, darker level than The Playboy of the Western World.
In 1997, aged just 27, McDonagh had four plays running in London’s West End, The Leenane Trilogy and The Cripple of Inishmaan. He showed little reverence for previous Irish dramatic efforts or identity, claiming “I’m not very keen on roots.” He insisted he had never read Synge prior to writing his plays and other comments hardly endeared him to those who had spent decades honing their craft: “I think stage plays are one of the easiest art forms.”
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Alastair Macaulay in the Financial Times argued that there was “too much of the Blarney” in the plays, also a complaint some will make about The Banshees, but also described him as “the Quentin Tarantino of the Emerald Isle”, reflecting his capacity to mix humour with horribly dysfunctional relationships and violence, all apparent in The Banshees of Inisherin which has the added advantage of stunning island landscapes.
Writers and artists have been drawn to the western islands since the 19th century, partly because, in Synge’s words in 1898, “the absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal”.
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Some artists played a role in mythologising and romanticising these barren if beautiful rocks, the irony being that creative souls were inspired by them as so many of their residents were seeking to leave them. But others did not shy away from exposing their underbellies and feelings of isolation and neglect: Peadar O’Donnell, the socialist republican, was moved by their plight as seen in Islanders (1927) and Proud Island (1975): in the latter novel, Mary Jim asks, “What have we to do with Ireland? What notice did Ireland ever take of us?”
Liam O’Flaherty, a native of Inis Mór, published his novel Skerrett in 1932, based on an island feud between a priest and teacher. The instability of island life, he suggested, “turns friends into foes and foes into friends with startling suddenness. It corrupts the dictionary of human qualities, making the stolid neurotic in their spleen”, surely another line that could be applied to The Banshees given the mix of mutilation, melancholy and madness.
McDonagh’s work is not for the thin-skinned, given its focus on pettiness, bloody-mindedness, the crumbling of authority and the dismissal of the myth promoted by another film-maker, Robert Flaherty in his 1934 Man of Aran, filmed on Inis Mór. Flaherty felt no compunction to depict reality as it was then, most memorably through the staging of a dramatic shark hunt, a pursuit long abandoned by the islanders. He was keen to contribute to the broader cultivation of Gaelic myth and, as Seán O’Faoláin was to comment acidly in 1944: “To the historian few spectacles are so fascinating as mass-delusions.” Nonetheless, Flaherty’s efforts won him best film award at the Venice Film Festival in 1935. McDonagh will be hoping for even higher accolades, building on a tradition he claims to be no part of.