CULTURE SHOCK:MARTIN MCDONAGH has always talked as if plays were poor man's films, but, ironically, his feature film debut In Brugeshas strong roots in theatre, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Given Martin McDonagh's long-stated preference for movies over theatre, it is easy to see his successful emergence as a screenwriter and director with In Brugesas the start of his real career.
Notwithstanding his natural brilliance as a theatrical
storyteller, and his apparently instinctive grasp of stage
mechanics, he has always talked as if plays are just poor man's
films. When I met him first in 1997, he told me that "I always
thought theatre was the least interesting of the art forms". Two
years ago, when I interviewed him again, he announced his intention
to stop writing plays altogether. The ease with which he has made
the leap into cinema, winning an Oscar with his first trial effort,
Six Shooter, and going on
to make a film as accomplished as
In Bruges, seems to cast a
dismissive shadow on his previous life in the theatre.
At first glance, the very theme of In Brugesappears to underline this point. It slots comfortably into a specifically cinematic history. The hitman story has been a staple sub-genre ever since Alan Ladd in This Gun For Hire. The physical and verbal relationship between Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in In Brugesbears more than a passing resemblance to Laurel and Hardy: rotund straight man and slight, accident-prone funny guy. The denouement has self-conscious echoes of classic westerns. And as if to ward off any connection to the bad old theatre days, the action is interwoven with the making of a pretentious Dutch movie, on whose set the last scenes are played.
But anyone with any notion of theatre history will see immediately that there's another, much more direct influence on In Bruges. Two hitmen, one older and more knowing, the other more naive and childlike, who spend most of their time cooped up in a strange room in a city not their own? The younger one haunted by the messy killing of their last victim? The younger one also making constant complaints about the place they're in? Messages arriving at unpredictable times from an unseen man known only by his surname, but who seems to be an east London crime boss? A tone that is both sinister and comic? Dialogue that makes a kind of poetry from banalities? Characters stopping in their tracks to ponder the oddness of certain words?
All of these elements come straight from Harold Pinter's 1957 play, The Dumb Waiter. One of McDonagh's earliest influences was a 1985 BBC TV production of The Dumb Waiterwith Ken Cranham and Colin Blakely. Its influence on In Brugesextends even to the hitmen having short three-letter names, Pinter's Ben and Gus becoming McDonagh's Ken and Ray.
While we in Ireland tend to see McDonagh through the prism of Synge, John B Keane and Tom Murphy, Pinter has always weighed heavily on the Anglo side of his particular Anglo-Irish fusion. This may have been more obvious in The Pillowmanthan in his Leenane and Aran Island plays, but McDonagh's use of dialogue has always owed most to Pinter, even when it comes with a Hiberno-English twist.
The irony of In Bruges, therefore, is that it is more directly indebted to another playwright than are any of McDonagh's plays. This is not a problem - McDonagh does so many interesting and inventive things with the set-up he has borrowed from The Dumb Waiterthat the family resemblance is, in one sense, neither here nor there. What it does, however, is to suggest that McDonagh remains far more of a playwright than he perhaps intends to be.
The plotting of In Brugesowes at least as much to the mechanics of theatrical melodrama as it does to thrillers and westerns. Ralph Fiennes's crime boss, with his weird code of honour, is a self-consciously theatrical villain. The old device of a character who seems peripheral, but who returns in the end to crucially shape the conclusion, like Young Fortinbras in Hamlet, is central to the way the film works. The device in this case is Jordan Prentice, who is a dwarf. For a long time, he and the "midget" jokes that run through the film seem like nothing more than an opportunity to be gratuitously offensive. But his physical stature turns out to be essential to the final scene. This way of constructing a plot has been used by film-makers, but it is not cinematic. It is good old-fashioned theatre.
The other fascination of the film's relationship to theatre is that it highlights an odd paradox. Violence is important to McDonagh's work as the crucible of revelation and redemption. It is generally assumed that film, with its ability to fake reality, is much better at portraying violence than theatre can ever be. In Brugessuggests the opposite. It has plenty of violence - the flashback to the hit that went wrong, Brendan Gleeson's gory self-sacrifice, the final shoot-out between Farrell and Fiennes.
But all of it is tame, stylised stuff compared to, say, the moment in The Beauty Queen of Leenanewhen Maureen presses Mag's hand onto the burning range. McDonagh will undoubtedly make more films and make them very well. But there are things in the theatre that he can't find in the cinema, and watching I n Brugesmade me oddly certain that he'll go back to the stage some day.