Martin McDonagh'nın Leenane Üçlemesinde Yaşlanma, Ölüm ve Çöküş

18th International Cultural Studies Symposium: Ageing, Surviving and Longevity, İzmir, Türkiye, 25 - 27 Mayıs 2022, ss.18-19

Ageing, Death and Decay in Martin McDonagh’s “The Leenane Trilogy”

Martin McDonagh is celebrated as one of the distinguished playwrights of this generation who

managed to find a place for himself in both British and Irish cannon. He is famous for his dynamic

plays which shock the audiences with their excessive violence but fascinate them with their wit and

humour. While portraying his characters’ existential struggles, their encounters with ageing and

dying, McDonagh adopts a rather grim approach. Compared to the modern world’s tendency to

evade death and erase mortality’s reminders from everyday life, in McDonagh’s plays death is at the

centre of daily struggles. Death is presented as a solution to the morbid relationships, a saviour from

deadening living conditions, therefore, death emerges as the key to survival. Particularly his

“Leenane Trilogy” including The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), A Skull in Connemara (1997), and

The Lonesome West (1997) presents the reader/audience with a variety of characters who deal with

the weight of ageing not by holding on to life in conventional manners by staying healthy, being

productive, setting up families but by resorting to violence leading to death. In these plays, there are

characters who kill their parents, take their own lives, pull bodies out of lakes, dug graves, smash

skulls. Death and decay are major parts of their struggle with adulthood and old age. This

presentation will look at the themes of ageing, death and decay in Martin McDonagh’s “The Leenane

Trilogy” and try to answer questions such as how the characters react to ageing or their own

mortality around bloodshed and death, what the connection between the land and the decay is as

all three plays share the same setting, whether the readers/the audiences of the trilogy leave their

books/the theatre rejuvenated or decrepit at the end of this artistic experience.