Martin McDonagh Monologues & Awards

Discover Martin McDonagh monologues and the many awards the British playwright, screenwriter, director and producer has won.

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Martin McDonagh Plays

The Leenane Trilogy

During school holidays, the McDonagh children spent time in County Galway, Ireland. Martin later used this as the setting for his first six plays, which form part of two trilogies.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996)

An unmarried woman faces her last chance at love, while her mother faces a grim end.

A Skull in Connemara (1997)

A man in Connemara is employed to exhume skeletons in an overcrowded graveyard, when he encounters the wife he was once accused of killing.

The Lonesome West (1999)

Two brothers bicker in the aftermath of the supposedly accidental fatal shooting of their father.

The Aran Islands Trilogy

Two of the three Aran Islands plays, set in Ireland, have been produced and published.

The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997)

A disabled teenager schemes to attain a role in Man of Aran in this dark comedy.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001)

The insane leader of an INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) splinter group discovers that his best friend, a cat, has been killed, in this dark comedy drawn from the horror of children killed in the 1993 Warrington bombings.

Banshees of Inisheer (unpublished)

A portrait of an ageing writer with declining skills, the final part of the Aran Islands Trilogy has not been performed or published.

Later Plays from Martin McDonagh

The Pillowman (2003)

The Pillowman provides an ideal Martin McDonagh monologue for men. It’s set in a fictitious totalitarian state, making it the first play written by Martin McDonagh which was not set in Ireland.

A writer, Katurian, is interrogated over the gruesome content in several of his Brothers Grimm-style short stories, which reflect the recent murders of three children.

Detective Ariel is exceedingly hot-headed and violent, and driven to protect children at all costs. He develops through the play from the scary iterrogator and torturer, into a more sympathic adult struggling with his own experience of childhood sexual abuse.

A Behanding in Spokane (2010)

Carmichael has been searching for his missing left hand for a quarter of a century.

Hangmen (2015)

Harry Wade is the owner of an old-fashioned pub in northern England, and also a hangman. He lives with his gin-drinking wife, unhappy teenage daughter, and a clientele fascinated by his hangman work, in which he’s second best only to Pierrepoint. On the day in 1965 Great Britain abolishes hanging, new faces arrive at the pub, including Mooney, a young stranger from London who provokes Harry by flirting with, and then pretending to have kidnapped and killed, his daughter Shirley.

A Very Very Very Dark Matter (2018)

Set in a townhouse in Copenhagen, we discover the dark source of the tales of children’s author Hans Christian Andersen and Victorian author Charles Dickens.

Martin McDonagh Films

Six Shooter (2004)

Martin McDonagh’s first short film was a black comedy he wrote and directed.

Gleeson’s character encounters a strange, and possibly psychotic, young man during a train journey homeward following his wife’s death. Shot on location in Wicklow, Waterford and Rosslare.

In Bruges (2008)

Martin McDonagh directed the feature-length film based on his own screenplay.

Two Irish hitmen hide in the Flemish city of Bruges after a problematic job.

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Martin McDonagh wrote, directed and produced the British-American satirical dark comedy.

Alcoholic writer Marty is drawn into the Los Angeles crime world when his dog friends steal yet another dog to ransom to its owners, discovering too late that it’s the beloved pooch of a gangster.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Martin McDonagh wrote, directed and produced the multi award winning dark-drama feature film, which follows a mother’s desperate attempts to find out who murdered her daughter several months earlier by painting three signs with a controversial message targeted at the town’s revered police chief, setting off powerful consequences.