Description: One of the most exciting young dramatists to emerge in Britain during the 1990s. His three most important plays in one volume
Brief description: Martin McDonagh is a London-born Irish playwright whose first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane was the 1996 winner of the George Devine Award. It also won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Fringe Play and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. The play was nominated for six Tony awards, of which it won four, and the Laurence Olivier Award. Since then McDonagh has gone on to write multiple smash-hit shows and films and win multiple awards including an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film for Six Shooter (2005), an Oscar nomination, a British Independent Film Award for best screenplay, an Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild Award for Best Film Script and a BAFTA for best original screenplay, all for In Bruges (starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, 2008), and a Laurence Olivier award for Best New Play for The Pillowman (won 2004).
Review Quotes:
"Martin McDonagh's The Leenane Trilogy, one of the great events of the contemporary Irish theatre." --Irish Times
"McDonagh's writing is pitiless but compassionate: he casts a cold, hard, but understanding eye on relationships made of mistrust, hesitation, resentment and malevolence." --Sunday Times of London "McDonagh's gift is at its most naked and infectious . . . it leaves you giddy with gruesome exhilaration." --Financial Times (A Skull in Connemara) "The play combines manic energy and physical violence in a way that is both hilarious and viscerally exciting." --Daily Telegraph (The Lonesome West) "A star is born, bright and blazing, confident, individual and shockingly accomplished" --Sunday Times