Skull in Connemara coming to Glór

MARTIN McDonagh is recognised as one of Ireland’s most important living playwrights and the uninitiated in Clare can see one part of his celebrated Leenane trilogy at Glór next month.
Decadent Theatre Company will perform A Skull in Connemara, and director Andrew Flynn says the play combines the grim with the hilarious.
“In all his work there is darkness there, but it is very, very funny. We’re into our third week at the moment, we did two weeks in Dublin and we’re in Tallaght at the moment and the audience are lapping it up.”
A Skull in Connemara was first performed by Druid in the late-’90s and is the middle part of the trilogy, sandwiched between The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Lonesome West.
It tells the tale of a man with one of most melancholy jobs in Connemara.
“The basic story is set in Leenane, it’s about a man called Mick Dowd,” explains Flynn.
“He has a job every year that doesn’t go down well in the town, he’s given the job of digging up bones of corpses that have been buried for more than seven years. He disinters the bones to make room for more arrivals coming. This is frowned upon in the locality, a local man digging up people’s relatives.
“He does it every year and on the evening that the play is set it has come to that time of year and this year he has to dig up the bones of his wife, who died seven years previously. The rumours are rife about how she died.
“His claim is that it was a drink-driving accident but others say that she was dead before she got into the car at all. That’s the premise of the play and it takes place in two locations; in Mick’s house predominantly but also in a graveyard where he starts to exhume the bodies.
“It’s a brilliant look at the West of Ireland/Connemara/rural landscape and the characters that inhabit that world.”
Flynn is a huge admirer of McDonagh. “When he came out first people said he was just another John B Keane, just rural Irish drama, but what Martin has done is bring his film influence to it, I suppose. People describe him as being a mix of John B Keane and Quentin Tarantino.
“In a rural Irish drama you don’t expect daughters to torture their mothers or people to kill their fathers. He brings an extreme cruelty into the world but what’s brilliant is that the characters are believable and real.
“There’s less violence in this play (than in some of McDonagh’s other work) I suppose but it’s still quite cutting and dark and the humour is on a knife edge. The characters are quite hard on each other and cruel, it’s very, very funny, but quite cutting, I suppose.”
He had praise for the actors involved. “John Olohon was in the Abbey for over 10 years and won the Irish Times award last year for best supporting actor, he’s playing the lead role and Bríd Ní Neachtain, who is a Galway woman who was on Broadway with Dancing at Lughnasa, plays Mary Johnny; there’s an actor from Limerick called Patrick Ryan who has done an awful lot of TV work, things like Pure Mule and Trivia. Then there’s a young guy called Jarlath Divinan plays Mairtín Hanlon and he’s a fantastic young actor.”