Justice In The Plays And Films Of Martin McDonagh 3030304523, 9783030304522, 9783030304539

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 5
Contents......Page 7
Abbreviations......Page 8
Abstract......Page 9
Manifestations of Justice/Criminal Law and Decontextualized Inscriptions......Page 16
Works Cited......Page 23
Introduction......Page 27
The Beauty Queen of Leenane: Investigative Incompetency and Genre Punishment......Page 31
A Skull in Connemara: Falsification, Corruption and Unreasonable Doubt......Page 35
The Cripple of Inishmaan: Fetishised Lawlessness and Justice in Abeyance......Page 41
Hangmen: Miscarriages of Justice and Principles of Precarity......Page 46
Works Cited......Page 52
Introduction......Page 53
Six Shooter: Self-Inflicted and Anarchic Justice......Page 54
The Lonesome West: Justice Perpetually and Eternally Deferred......Page 57
In Bruges: Consequential and Unconditional Justice and Its Peculiar Enactments......Page 64
The Pillowman: Coerced Truths, Diminished Capacity and Myths of Justice Substitutes......Page 69
Works cited......Page 80
Introduction......Page 83
The Lieutenant of Inishmore: To the Victim the Spoils of Justice......Page 84
A Behanding in Spokane: An Avenger’s/Revenger’s Tragedy......Page 92
Seven Psychopaths: Vigilantism and Sacrifice as Perverse Protest Against Injustices......Page 97
A Very Very Very Dark Matter: Mutilation, Erased and Alternative Histories......Page 102
Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri: Gendered and Endangered Justice......Page 111
Works Cited......Page 122
Introduction......Page 126
Abject Conditions......Page 129
Abject Genres and Violated Bodies......Page 131
Abject Language and Offence......Page 133
Burning and Abjection......Page 137
Abject Laughter/Abject Justice......Page 138
Conclusion: Criminal Law/Wholesale Injustices......Page 142
Works Cited......Page 145
Index......Page 147

Citation preview

Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh

Eamonn Jordan

Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh

Eamonn Jordan

Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh

Eamonn Jordan School of English, Drama and Film University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-030-30452-2 ISBN 978-3-030-30453-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30453-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This has been a great project to work on. Thanks for all the wonderful support I received from the Palgrave team, including Ellie Freedman, Emily Wood and Lina Aboujieb. Thanks to colleagues in the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin and the College of Arts and Humanities’ granting of Research Leave that allowed me the time to finish this project. As this is another attempt to engage with the work of Martin McDonagh, I have to thank all those who have inputted on my previous attempts, contributors and my co-editor, Lilian Chambers on The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories and assistance and advice I received from so many in preparation of my earlier monograph From Leenane to LA: The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh. Thanks to the numerous conference and research seminar organisers that allowed me to test ideas, often for the first time in public. My Third-Year module on McDonagh’s work has always been a particular joy to teach; so thanks to all those students over the years. To each and every M.A. and Ph.D. student I have worked with, I would like to thank, particularly those who research in the area of Irish and Contemporary Theatre and performance. I have learned much from your responses about the writings of McDonagh. Thanks to the theatre and film companies that have and will keep producing the work of McDonagh. Thanks to Fiona Daly and Rhona Trench who read sections of this work. Thanks to Dermott Barrett for his assistance in the proofing of this manuscript. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Finally, to Marian, Roisin, and Ian, whose support and encouragement I constantly rely on. My debt and my gratitude to all three of you is inestimable.

Contents

1 Introduction: Beware of Justice 1 2 Incompetence and Corrupt Agents of the State 19 3 Guilt Affirmation and Interfacing Alternative Systems of Justice 45 4 “Self-Help” Justice and the Vigilante Victim’s Conundrum 75 5 The Whole of Nothing 119 Index 141

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Abbreviations

Title

Abbreviations

Internal referencing

A Behanding in Spokane A Skull in Connemara A Very Very Very Dark Matter Hangmen In Bruges Seven Psychopaths Six Shooter The Beauty Queen of Leenane The Lieutenant of Inishmore The Lonesome West The Pillowman Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri

Spokane Skull Dark Matter Hangmen Bruges Psychopaths Shooter Beauty Queen Inishmore Lonesome Pillowman Billboards

S SC DM H IB SP SS BQ I LW P B

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Beware of Justice

Abstract  This chapter introduces Martin McDonagh’s inclination to place unconventional characters in situations of intense extremity, often for comic effect. The chapter then signals the wide range of critical perspectives already offered by commentators in relation to McDonagh’s body of work. Finally, the chapter starts to consider how Amartya Sen’s reflections, amongst others, on the idea of justice offer an appropriate frame to tease out and interrogate the various manifestations of criminal justice in McDonagh’s writings. Keywords  Writing style Comedy · Justice

· Critical commentary · Morality · Violence ·

Born in London on 26 March 1970 to Irish parents, Martin Faranan McDonagh is one of the most performed playwrights in the world today. The fact that the plays are so regularly revived in multiple contexts across the globe from Dublin to Dubai, from London to Perm (a Russian city that hosted two international festivals dedicated to McDonagh’s work), speaks to the relevance and importance of his writing. In the world of film, as writer/director, McDonagh has had notable successes with his highly regarded three full-length films, and one film short. It is less important to regard him as an Irish, English, London-Irish or AngloIrish writer, as he is a cosmopolitan writer, whose identity has been shaped by post-colonial, globalised and diasporic factors. (See Jordan © The Author(s) 2019 E. Jordan, Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30453-9_1

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[2014, 1–7] on McDonagh’s background, and Brah, 1996 on the impact of poly-locationality on diasporic populations.) Martin McDonagh’s writing for stage and screen is widely noted for its taboo transgressions, moral ambiguities and various inflammatory extravagances, particularly its association with excesses and extremes of violence. Aspects of McDonagh’s dramaturgical intent are especially evident in the coarse, twisted and contradictory dispositions of characters who are noted for their irritating fixations, petty and irrational obsessions, vindictive sentiments, and ridiculous self-justifications. They are self-assured, reinforced by their own self-deceptions and self-belief, unafraid of their own myths, never unnerved by knock-backs, failures or uncomplimentary feedback from others. Character relationships are shaped as much by sentimentality as they are by ruthlessness, by an inability to calibrate the differences of another, and by unadorned empathy deficiencies. In the Oscar-winning short-film Six Shooter (2005) a couple that have just lost their child to a cot death are called “Fred and Rosemary” [West], after the notorious serial killers, by a troubled character, Kid. Most characters are blatantly unpredictable in their responses to the circumstances in which they find themselves. With few exceptions McDonagh affords his characters little consideration of their own motives or adequate space to reflect on their actions. Thus, prompted more by impulse rather than reflection and by compulsion rather than choice, ill-conceived and ill-concealed character self-interest leads habitually to catastrophic outcomes. When reflection enters the fray, it regularly dissipates, particularly in the early work. Audiences are often disorientated by not knowing quite how to position themselves, in relation to a character, situation or expressed values. However incendiary, gruesome and provocative the writing, staging and cinematographic strategies seem to be, these are distorted, magnified and indeed often moderated by genre shifting, re-framing or blurring, thus complicating reception frames. (See Weitz [2012], on the idea of sleights-of-frame.) This is a body of work comfortable with the concurrent mingling of various genres. The work combines the tragic-comic, the melodramatic, the farcical, the grotesque, the surreal, the carnivalesque as well as the sensibilities of Théâtre du Grand-Guignol— (hereafter Grand-Guignol) in both the films and the plays. (See Jordan 2014, 12–19.) For Manohla Dargis, “McDonagh likes to play comedy

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against violence and to wring laughs out of the unspeakable” (2017). A tongue-in-cheek disposition ensures that there is a constant flitting from the serious and intense to the mundane and the throwaway—the switching of sensibility from the profound to the profane and vice versa is often instantaneous rather than built up incrementally. Further, a habitual uncertainty principle forefronts improbability, additional ambivalence and ambiguity. Chaos surfaces in multiple ways with characters detaching from reality as Maureen does in The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), or by characters being denied the outcomes that they have vigorously pursued. Donnelly fails to kill himself in Shooter when the gun explodes as he is about to take his own life, and in A Behanding in Spokane (2010) Carmichael cannot set alight a petrol-soaked hotel room because of a malfunctioning cigarette lighter. An anarchic sensibility is evident also when behaviours deemed just are not necessarily rewarded or evil actions are not inevitably punished as seen in Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and, by the bedlam associated with the return of characters long considered dead, from A Skull in Connemara (1997) to Hangmen (2015). McDonagh’s characters express racist, gender, ageist, ableist, sizeist (stature and girth) and national prejudices often to maximise offence towards ideological and politically correct sensitivities. Some find the reinforcement of gender types and national stereotypes offensive, and that the racist and homophobic comments of characters are in bad taste, no matter the framing, while others take comfort in the playfulness and destabilising attempts to transgress norms. In Billboards, Dixon’s attempt to cause offence to Red is based on his misinformation about Cuba’s human rights violations, but Red brings such injustices far closer to home, to Wyoming, and, in effect, the Mathew Shepard killing in Laramie. The tables on the intended offence are turned, so to speak. Criticism of McDonagh to date has taken the form of various articles that tend to focus on specific works, occasional attempts to offer overviews, like Martin Middeke’s (2010) or collections of essays (Chambers and Jordan’s [2006], and Rankin Russell’s [2007]), book projects by Patrick Lonergan (2012) and my own monograph which includes in-depth analysis of the plays in performance (Jordan 2014). Others have looked at the work from multiple perspectives, ranging from Gender, Sexuality and Violence (Kurdi [2006] and FitzPatrick Dean [2012]), Intertextuality (Morash [2002] and Clare [2015]), Black

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Pastoral (Grene 2000), Irony, Pastiche and Parody (Wallace 2006), Grotesque/Puppet Theatre (Pilný 2006), Hypermasculinity imploded by its reinforcement and conspicuous retraction (Ferguson 2019), “medieval allusions” (Rouse 2011), and In-Yer-Face dramaturgy and a “pessimism about humanity” (Sierz 2001, 219). Critical readings are offered with emphasis on Diasporic Discourses, Post-Colonial Subjectivities (Ferguson 2016), Neo-Colonialism (Merriman 1999), Race (Als 2010), Globalisation (Lonergan 2009, 2012), Postmodernism, Irony, Nostalgia and “contingent truths” (Lanters 2012, 169), and the Postdramatic, ambivalence and ethics (Wallace 2018). The Pillowman variously invites allegorical (Worthen and Worthen 2006), language games (Fitzpatrick 2006), Focualtdian (Haughton 2012) or Žižekian (Akşehir-Uygur 2017) readings. Fintan O’Toole notes that McDonagh is a part of an Irish Gothic tradition, which “has always been about the sublimation of very real horrors into imaginary terrors” (2018). For John Lahr “The louts and lunatics who inhabit” The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001) “are just such gruesome and unforgettable figures; as all gargoyles do, they inspire an almost childish terror and elation in the audience. In its horror and hilarity, it works as an act of both revenge and repair, turning the tables on grief and goonery, and forcing the audience to think about the unthinkable” (2006). McDonagh himself has linked his ­writing to both a “pacifist rage” (O’Hagan 2001) and “pure moral outrage” (Chambers 2018), a viewpoint offset by Paul Taylor’s claim that McDonagh has a “disturbingly defective moral sense” (2003) and by Pilný’s accusation that ethical considerations are not taken as seriously as they should be (2018). The connection between religion and morality is the focus of much of the writing on In Bruges (2008), especially that of O’Brien (2012). Shaun Richards, Hilton Als, Joan FitzPatrick Dean and O’Toole offer different examples of argument positioning. Richards proposes that the most striking feature of the Leenane Trilogy “is the absence of any informing moral structure on which authority itself rests” (2003, 11). FitzPatrick Dean notes that “questions of morality often remain totally abstract, recondite, and mysterious for many of his characters, especially in his Irish plays” (2018, 101). Subsequent to Als’ negative comments in a review on McDonagh and the handling of race in 2010s Behanding, more recently Als suggests that McDonagh is a “proper moralist”:

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McDonagh’s dramatic world is defined by power and filled with cruelty and injustice; the bad guy takes center stage but doesn’t always get called out. When he revels in his wrongdoing, he’s so sly and funny that we forget to disapprove until it’s too late—and then we feel doubly guilty for having enjoyed swimming in all that filth. Part of what makes McDonagh’s plays so upsetting is that he’s a proper moralist, with a severe heart and a weird acceptance of the worst. (2017)

Als links justice, morality and the implications of breaches of expectation for audiences, who find themselves within realms of uncertainty. Specific writing on body violation (Doyle 2007), violence and comedy (Rees 2009), genre, farce and dismemberment (Wallace 2006) are some examples of how scholars have discussed how violent, criminal or vicious acts are premeditated, reflexive, opportunistic, symbolic, predatorial, psychopathic, sadistic and self-destructive. But few critics have sufficiently pursued the significance of such violent actions—namely, vengeance, revenge, restitution, a violence of last resort or claims of self-defence—in relation to justice. O’Toole positions the Leenane Trilogy as: A version of one of the great mythic landscapes – the world before morality. It is the ancient Greece of The Oresteia – a cycle of death and revenge before the invention of justice. It is, perhaps more to the point, the Wild West of John Ford’s westerns or Cormac McCarthy’s novels, a raw frontier beyond civilization. (1997, 12)

“Before morality” and “before the invention of justice” are important trigger perspectives. And Ben Brantley notes: “McDonagh puts his characters through a series of whiplash reversals in which distinguishing fact from fiction, malice from affection and heroes from villains becomes a serious challenge” (2014) and it is such blurring that interests me. At times the focus of Patrick Lonergan’s writing on McDonagh has been on the law, on not taking the law seriously, and on the absence and flaws of justice. Lonergan notes “if Thomas [Skull] is an example of Irish law enforcement, then it seems reasonable to assume that the inquest into Oona’s death might well have been flawed” (2012, 21). Additionally, Lonergan’s response to Tupolski in Pillowman (2003) is significant: “He shows that the enactment of law involves not just the punishment of the criminal but also the performance of the act of punishment” (2012, 104). Akşehir-Uygur suggests in relation to Pillowman, like I will do, that “it becomes really hard to draw the boundaries between the victim and

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the perpetrator,” as police interrogators are pawns in a larger game of violence and oppression (2017, 361). The appearance of 2015s Hangmen prompts scholars like FitzPatrick Dean (2018), Lanters (2018) and Pilný (2018) to be more cognisant of the issue of justice. In relation to capital punishment, FitzPatrick Dean notes how the requirement of absolute certainty presses for an end to McDonagh’s more traditional practice of “epistemological instability” (2018, 102). In McDonagh’s plays and films the frequency with which his characters are agents of criminal justice is telling, namely police officers, investigating detectives, prison guards or hangmen. Invariably, these characters act in ways that ensure that there is nothing necessarily natural, ordered, substantive or inevitable about State-administered justice. Investigative failures, blind spots, incompetencies, justice illiteracy and corruption lead invariably to calamitous miscarriages of justice. Non-State agent characters respond to perceived injustices by taking the law into their own hands (“self-help” justice as Steven Pinker describes it [99]) and then often propose and practise rival systems of justice, resulting in the killing of oppressive authority figures, paramilitary activities, punishment beatings, kangaroo courts, vigilantism, or lynch mob formation. Such characters appropriate ideas of heightened, if not fundamental principles of justice, evoking codes of honour that licence extreme extra-judicial actions. McDonagh further obfuscates issues of justice by including real life characters and historic situations in his fictional worlds. In Inishmore it is the killing of the politician, Airey Neave, whose car exploded as he left a House of Commons car park on 30 March 1979. In Hangmen there is Albert Pierrepoint, a real life, celebrity hangman, and direct and indirect references to real criminal cases are made. The Mỹ Lai massacre is central to the Vietnamese character’s revenge narrative in Psychopaths (2012). In A Very Very Very Dark Matter (2018) it is Belgium’s colonisation of the Congo in the nineteenth century that features. The real spaces of Leenane, Spokane, Bruges, Oldham, Copenhagen, and London interconnect with the indeterminate fictional spaces of Kamenice (Pillowman), Tarlington (Spokane), and Ebbing (Billboards). McDonagh’s creative worlds are ones where distinctions between victim and perpetrator and guilt and innocence are precarious, where the burden of truth seldom reaches the threshold of beyond reasonable doubt as in criminal law cases, and where punishments and rewards of criminal justice are applied disproportionately and prejudicially.

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McDonagh’s writing is additionally complicated by the presence and significance of variously violated bodies/skeletal remains, including those of adults, adult/children, teenagers, children or animals—some of whom are established as innocent characters/figures, some as villainous while, sometimes, neither term neatly applies. While I have evaluated most of these plays and films on other occasions, and although I will work with many of the same scenarios and textual and performance details, sometimes even with ideas substantiated by the same scholarly commentaries, my perspective, emphasis, and argument here is very different. While individual chapters are structured to link certain plays and films, and allow them to speak to each other, the analysis of particular works could be easily rehoused in other chapters, so the chapter divisions allow me to structure my argument rather than affirm any definitive clusterings. This publication’s focus is not on criminology, sociology, abnormal psychology, critical race theory, gender or class studies, seldom addresses social, distributive or restorative forms of justice, the prohibitive costs to access justice, how people evade the law by devious or obstructive means, nor the connections between crime, poverty, and disadvantage. Neither is the publication directly about political and elite interferences nor about widespread corruption within justice systems more broadly. Equally, I am not addressing the prevalence of criminality within popular culture. This project is partially about criminal justice and how it is manifested, undermined, enhanced and abjected in McDonagh’s writing for stage and screen and partially, it is about justice and the ideology of liberal democracies, and how justice, sometimes serves as a formidable and also an illusionary bedrock of state. Although the plays and films have Irish, English and American settings, yet in many instances are set in places that are not necessarily real, and are written in ways that dissociate themselves from the real, despite the significant markers of contextualization that connect the work to such nations, it would be impossible to situate this project in direct relation to the criminal law as it applies in such jurisdictions. Even less useful would be attempts by a non-legal scholar to give the impression of a substantial working knowledge of such wide-ranging contexts and complex legal issues. My approach is a common sense/general common knowledge approach to various criminal justice scenarios, alert to the broader issues of justice in terms of rights, freedoms and responsibilities, protections

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and enforcement, cognizant of how imaginative works interconnect with real world issues, without being reliant on the specificities, authorities, precedents, judgements and complex nuances and principles of criminal law.

Manifestations of Justice/Criminal Law and Decontextualized Inscriptions Before turning to criminal law, I need to build my argument, by affirming a wide-focus approach to justice, that is not just about fairness, but about forms of justice that are plural, comparative, consequence-driven. Accordingly, the “reason-based,” and institution and administrative focused theory of justice proposed by Nobel Laureate (for Economic Science) and political philosopher, Amartya Sen especially serves my purpose. His overview offers a comprehensive application of his ideas of justice. Sen proposes a “[c]ritical assessment of the grounds upon which judgments about justice are based,” namely liberties and equalities, whether measured in terms of “freedoms, capabilities, resources, happiness, well-being,” consequences and obligations (2010, ix). For Sen “[t]here is a clear connection between the objectivity of a judgement and its ability to withstand public scrutiny” (394). Broadly, Sen associates justice with a need to recognise and respond to circumstances and conditions of manifest injustice. Sen refutes the idealism associated with transcendental or utopian conceptualisations of justice that he sees in the “contractarian approach” (xvi) as proposed by John Rawls in his landmark publication, A Theory of Justice (1971). Sen cogently deconstructs the Rawlsian “[J]ustice as fairness,” model (11) based on the notion of a foundational liberty, impartiality, “primordial equality,” “devised ignorance,” “unanimous choice,” “conformity,” “equity,” and spontaneous productivity (55–64). Rawls’ ideas, Sen argues, are propped up by presumptions of compliance, prudence, unanimity of choice and by the inclination to uphold the law (7). From Sen’s perspective, Rawls places too much emphasis on liberty, and is over-reliant on the idea of “just institutions” and spontaneous reasonableness, without enough consideration given to the realisations of justice. According to Sen, Rawls offers an “arrangement focused” rather than a “realization focused understanding” (7) delivering “transcendental institutionalism” (5) rather than “comparative institutionalism” (6).

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The latter is a concept Sen takes from Social Choice Theory, which proposes the “inescapable plurality of competing principles” (106). Effectively for Sen, a good starting point is not the question as to “what is a just society” (105) because “[a] transcendental identification, is thus neither necessary nor sufficient for arriving at comparative judgments of justice” (102). To generate this comparative model of justice, and to promote his advocacy of “deliberative democracy” (381) Sen “concentrates on the practical reasons behind what is to be chosen and which decisions should be taken, rather than speculating on what a perfectly just society would look like” (106). Effectively, Sen opts for ways of advancing and enhancing the institutions and administration of justice, rather than endlessly defining the characteristics of an imagined society driven by a desire to eliminate injustice. Not only does Sen advance a realisation and consequence-led theory of justice, but champions provisional, incomplete and contingent beneficial outcomes. For Sen, “the agreements arrived at need not demand that some proposal is uniquely just, but perhaps only that it is plausibly just, or at least not manifestly unjust” (135). Sen’s idea of justice involves trade-offs, is comparative, rather than unifocal, is less institutionally obsessed, and more reliant on the behaviour of such institutions and with the impacts and outcomes on lives mattering more to his system of justice. Sen is also particularly empathic about the responsibilities of those in positions of power to act not simply in an egalitarian fashion but to espouse ways of eliminating manifest injustices globally, so he also offers consideration of the impact of justice within and beyond one’s locality or state. Sen’s work recognises the importance of comparative and diametrically opposed systems of justice, which both Bruges (2008) and Psychopaths (2012) countenance. In Bruges, criminal overlord Harry is fixated on principles and matters of honour, or as Rouse describes it as a “neo-chivalric order” (173). In Psychopaths, moral teachings from Catholicism, Quakerism, Buddhism and Hinduism combine with gangland principles, the consequences of pacifist stalking, self-immolation as protest, restorative and unconditional justice, in order to circulate, cross-connect a variety of rival justice claims. To these we can add the justice norms of Hollywood movies, and the fairy tale and melodramatic informed modes of justice seen in other works.

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Differently to Sen, moral philosopher Michael J. Sandel clusters principles of justice in terms of Utilitarianism (maximising welfare), Libertarianism (unfettered and unencumbered freedoms, a laissez-faire sensibility), Egalitarianism (respecting freedom, duty, rights, consent, and social contract), and Communitarianism (telos [purpose, end, essential nature], moral desert, mutual obligation and the promotion of virtue, honour and the common good) (218–221). For Sandel, “… Questions of justice are bound up with competing notions of honour and virtue, pride and recognition. Justice is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things” (261). In many ways, it is how justice becomes an expression of purpose and the virtues that it honours as Sandel espouses combined with Sen’s emphasis on reason, realisation and the accommodation of rival, comparative and plural systems of justice that will provide the over-arching framework for this critical engagement for the encounters McDonagh’s characters have with criminal justice systems. In terms of criminal justice, I am working with an understanding of the basic jurisdictional principles of law; these are derived from statutes and Common Law in England, and in addition to statutes and Common Law, Irish law must be in alignment with the constitutional rights and guarantees afforded citizens, and such laws must not be in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights. (See Read and Fitzpatrick, 4, and Hanly, 3–4.) American criminal justice relies on statute, constitutional protections and the Law Institute’s Model Penal Code. Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg note that: While American criminal law, as a historical matter, owes more to utilitarian legal thought than to deontological moral philosophy, any body of criminal law is both retributive and preventive in function. Criminal law regulates violence by asserting a public monopoly on vengeance. It mobilizes collective blame and deploys it to take sides in violent social conflicts. It may not be able to prevent every act of victimization, but by vindicating victims, it prevents them from suffering the indignity of an offender victimizing them with impunity. In this way, criminal law serves as a guarantor of each individual’s civic equality. By identifying the state as the ultimate protector of each individual’s security and dignity, criminal law gives each individual a stake in the law’s authority…. [C]riminal law is uniquely important in legitimizing the rule of law itself. (1175)

Accordingly, this pivot project takes as a starting point the “legitimizing” of the rule of law, the role of the state as a protector of its citizens,

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that victims need vindication and perpetrators should be punished, that justice is about matters of equality and that sides must be taken in the determination of guilt or innocence, culpability, retribution or restitution. For Conor Hanly, the “prime purpose” of criminal law “is the identification and suppression of criminal activity” (3). In order to establish that a crime has taken place, there must be a law that recognises the offence (Hanly, 38) and that “the prohibition be defined with some degree of certainty,” (40) that the law cannot use vagueness, and, there is a prohibition on retrospective legislation (40). In terms of criminal justice there is a simple measure, proposed by Alan Read and Ben Fitzpatrick: “Has a particular offence been committed on the given facts” (1). Matters for the criminal courts include common assault, sexual assault, assault occasioning bodily harm and grievous bodily harm, manslaughter and murder (Read and Fitzpatrick, 316). Criminal law distinguishes between two factors: Actus reus, a guilty act or voluntary unlawful conduct or occasional failure to act (See Read and Fitzpatrick, 11–16) and Mens rea, a guilty mind, more precisely culpability, “moral blameworthiness”, or a conscious exercise of will, and these can be actions that are imprecisely summarised as “intentional,” reckless or negligent (Read and Fitzpatrick, 55–57). Mens rea is not the same as motive (ibid., 56), but motive may be used to establish intent. Accordingly, criminal guilt is reliant on the confirmation of the act, plus the establishment of Mens rea, as Hanly puts it, “an act does not make a man guilty unless his mind is also guilty” (45). For Hanly: Modern society considers it to be fundamentally unjust to punish those who do not understand the consequences of their conduct or those who bring about harm accidentally or under a mistaken impression of the circumstances …. Mens rea today encompasses a wide range of fault situations that may be mental states – intention, knowledge, ‘subjective’ recklessness, belief – and some that are not really mental states at all, but rather failures to consider consequences, ‘objective’ recklessness and negligence. (73)

Also, Reed and Fitzpatrick signal the importance of differentiation to criminal law, in the identification of offences, there is a need to distinguish between actions that are crimes and those that are not, between crimes of “greater and lesser seriousness,” between a legal system that offers “fair warning to its citizens as to how their behaviours should be

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regulated and to the consequences that will follow,” or fails adequately to do so (3–4). Criminal justice relies in its determinations on two key pillars, the presumption of innocence for anyone facing prosecution, and that within the judicial system, guilt is established beyond reasonable doubt. In the main, the burden of proof resides with the prosecution to establish guilt, the defendant does not have to prove innocence, but legislation can require a defendant to “meet an evidential burden in order to raise a defence and to disprove the charge,” in instances like intent to supply prescribed substances, or to account for what seems like illegal gains (Hanly, 43). Likewise, the defence does have to prove a defendant’s insanity at the time of the alleged crime. Indeed, the European Court of Human Rights accepts the compatibility of this burden of defensive proof with Article 6.2 of the Convention which espouses the presumption of innocence (Hanly, 44–45). The burden of proof is set very high, at the point of a finding being beyond reasonable doubt, but does not amount to absolute certainty (Read and Fitzpatrick, 9). Given the inordinate emphasis on criminality and violence in the plays and films, McDonagh’s work enacts complicated interfaces of liability, wilfulness, negligence, recklessness and diminished capacity. His characters engage in theft, blackmail, criminal damage and destruction of property, arson, illegal interrogation, racist inspired torture, false imprisonment, abduction, forced feeding, sexual assaults of adults and children, grievous bodily harm, evidence tampering, disinterring without court permission, provision of false alibis and witness statements, and are accessories to crimes after the fact. Characters commit homicide, patricide, matricide, uxoricide, summary executions and mercy killings. Remorselessly, the plays and films capture the perverting of the course of justice. Characters’ encounters with criminal justice are invariably unsettling; they are seldom afforded the usual basic rights they might assume that they possess, as they come under suspicion. When characters engage in extra-judicial actions, like kangaroo courts, form lynch mobs or take the law into their own hands, nobody is afforded the presumption of innocence or that the burden of proof reaches the threshold of beyond reasonable doubt. The right to have legal representation and the right of appeal are also absent. Illegitimate courts make no pretence to mimic the best practices of justice, even if such actions are done in the name of justice. And on the matter of differentiation raised earlier by Read and Fitzpatrick,

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McDonagh’s characters refuse to have their behaviours regulated, and are clearly not keen on the consequences that may follow on from criminal actions. Part of the issue is that characters refuse to countenance liability, and often attempt to collapse differentials between being a perpetrator and victim, and downplay or ignore the scale of their crimes. Pillowman’s Katurian is a victim and perpetrator in his dealings with his parents, also a rescuer, protector and mercy killer of Michal. For Hanly, the objectives of punishment are “incapacitation, retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation” (20). In the plays and films, there are no straight forward punishments for the various crimes committed, and few punishments that mimic a more organic form of justice. For so many crimes in the plays and films punishment is seldom a deterrence, there is little or no legitimate retribution, and rehabilitation is only evident in tangential forms, un-related to the practices of criminal justice seen in the second chance Ken offers Ray in Bruges, or the confessional mode of resolution that Fr Welsh encourages the Connor brothers to participate in Lonesome, a false if parallel mode that steers them away from criminal justice. There is little rehabilitation on offer in the work, Ray is almost the only one who does not self-justify, in contrast to Harry in Hangmen, his actions, and is open to whatever justice the mother of the child he has killed might determine for him. Equally, there are no inevitable just deserts, crime and punishment misalign. Rather than facing the criminal justice system, Maureen in Beauty Queen is punished for killing her mother by being trapped in her own home, as her dead mother is failed by the inadequacy of police investigation. Many characters appear so unhinged that a defence of insanity, or at least diminished responsibility might seem appropriate. Apart from Willoughby in Billboards, McDonagh’s work is dominated by incompetent policing as in Beauty Queen and Inishmaan, belated policing interventions in Psychopaths, or the corrupt actions of police officers as in Thomas Hanlon (Skull), DCI Fry (Hangmen), Ariel and Tupolski (Pillowman), and Dixon (Billboards). According to Read and Fitzpatrick “Trials do not have an impact on what the law actually is” (6), but what is notable,—apart from Hangmen, the plays and films never reach a court of law. Instead, what we witness are inadequate criminal investigations, the roughhouse interviewing of suspects, and characters taking it upon themselves to act as prosecutors, judge and jury. An active lynch mob in Hangmen, solo punishments doled out by a paramilitary character mimicking the actions of sectarian

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kangaroo courts or the paramilitary factional feuding in Inishmore that licences execution, or vigilante actions in Billboards are the order of the day. Characters are not only illegitimately misappropriating justice, but more importantly attesting to, exploiting and substituting in quasi-legal principles, without foundation. Miscarriages of justice abound. In Pillowman, the brain-damaged Michal commits a series of murders, but his intention is confused; he can barely distinguish between right and wrong, his motives are triggered by a poor working knowledge of or even a disconnect from reality and by a distorted world-view; he does not have clear and reasonable foresight as to the consequences of his actions, however negligent, reckless and violationary they are. How culpable/accountable is he, when his intent is ambiguous if not transgressive? What is there to affirm both the guilty act and the guilty mind? Actions are incited not by Michal’s own desires but provoked, licenced and encouraged by his brother’s stories (dystopian cultural defence) and consequences and outcomes measured not by the fatalities that ensue, but by how they differentiate from such narratives. Michal has or has not acted alone, if we allow for the undue influence of the stories on him, and moreover, torture at the hands of his parents has hindered his autonomy and his unified sense of self. That his victims are children murdered in the most gruesome of ways complicates matters of guilt and innocence further, given how such actions are always more distasteful. Accordingly, my emphasis here is how McDonagh’s writings capture/dramatize criminal incidents and their investigation, and adjudicate on matters of guilt, innocence, proportionality, timeliness, impartiality, enforcement, liability, culpability, provocation, sanction, and penalty. Likewise, what is the significance of the genre and staging strategies utilized in such realisations. These are characters rather than people, dramatic locales rather than necessarily real places, and fictive actions linked genre requirements, spectator expectation, and the need for some form of dramatic closure, rather than being crimes with extensive lived consequences. Accordingly, there are few accounts of the lingering impacts of violence and injustices on characters, no evidence of how miscarriages of justice can badly determine lives years afterwards, no injuries that need ongoing treatments and no communal traumatic legacies that take decades to relieve. Yet, drama and theatre, crime and punishment, anarchic violence and titillation, criminal justice and just desserts interweave in especially complex ways. McDonagh’s writings offer no pretence of authenticity, and no signalling

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that the writing either acknowledges or substantiates the workings of the law. That said, it is worth noting the particular and notable miscarriages of justice associated with the Birmingham Six (Beauty Queen) or the Guildford Four cases (Inishmore), the abolition of capital punishment referenced in Hangmen, or the referencing of Californian legislation on gang membership in relation to collective culpability that is apparent in Mildred’s comments in Billboards. Across the works by McDonagh discussed here, expressions and demarcations of justice are shaped by the inter-digitisations of various non-realistic genres and moments of violationary harm/sensation, but these instances are connected not just to horror but to disbelief, taboo transgression and laughter. This subversive, anarchic humorous intent complicates the dramaturgical circulation of rival and comparative and anything but a unifocal system of justice. Distinctions between heroism and treachery, victim and perpetrator, virtue and malice, protection and poor enforcement, and reward and punishment, truth and lies are categories that are endlessly blurred. Additionally, the heterogeneous justice frames—informed by religion, morality, ideology and philosophy—that McDonagh’s characters believe themselves to be operating within—are invariably flipped or even ruptured; ensuring that justice is neither simple nor clear-cut. However, the breaches of expectations and imperatives of justice are not necessarily a rejection or demonization of justice, rather its precariousness is foregrounded, within constitutional democracies and neo-liberal practices.

Works Cited Akşehir-Uygur, Mahinur. 2017. “Crush Humanity One More Time: Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman in Žižekian Terms.” New Theatre Quarterly 33 (4): 360–370. Als, Hilton. 2010. “Review of Behanding in Spokane.” New Yorker, 7 May. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/15/underhanded. Als, Hilton. 2017. “Martin McDonagh’s Repressed, Explosive World.” New Yorker, 30 January. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/ martin-mcdonaghs-repressed-explosive-world. Binder, Guyora, and Robert Weisberg. 2016. “What Is Criminal Law About?” Michigan Law Review 114 (6): 1173–1205. Brantley, Ben. 2014. “Hope Is Hollywood, Out of the Blue.” New York Times, 20 April. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/theater/daniel-radcliffestars-in-revival-of-the-cripple-of-inishmaan.html.

16  E. JORDAN Chambers, Lilian, and Eamonn Jordan, eds. 2006. The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Chambers, Robert. 2018. “Martin McDonagh, Interviewed by an In Bruges Obsessive.” GQ Magazine, 12 January. https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/ article/martin-mcdonagh-interview. Clare, David. 2015. “The Intertextual Presence of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall in Martin McDonagh’s Six Shooter.” Irish University Review 45 (2): 335–351. Curtis, Nick. 2006. “Brit’s Short Rise to Fame.” Evening Standard, 7 March. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/film/article-21913927-brits-short-rise-tofame.do. Dargis, Manohla. 2017. “Review: On Violence and the Pain of Others in ‘Three Billboards’.” New York Times, 8 November. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/11/08/movies/review-three-billboards-outside-ebbing-missouri-martin-mcdonagh.html?referrer=google_kp. Doyle, Maria. 2007. “Breaking Bodies: The Presence of Violence on Martin McDonagh’s Stage.” In Martin McDonagh, A Casebook, edited by Richard Rankin Russell, 92–110. London: Routledge. Ferguson, Molly E. 2016. “Killing Them Softly: Pillowman Assassins in the Works of Martin McDonagh and Salman Rushdie.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (6): 713–725. Ferguson, Molly E. 2019. “‘I Retract that Bit…’: Hypermasculinity and Violence in Martin McDonagh’s Films.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 30 (1): 25–43. Fitzpatrick Dean, Joan. 2012. “McDonagh’s Gender Trouble.” In The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh, 209–222. London: Methuen. Fitzpatrick Dean, Joan. 2018. “Martin McDonagh’s Epistemological Instability: The Noose of Hangmen.” In Boundaries, Passages, Transitions: Essays in Irish Literature, Culture and Politics in Honour of Werner Huber, edited by Hedwig Schwall, 101–110. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. 43, no. 1. 44–59. Fitzpatrick, Lisa. 2006. “Language Games: The Pillowman, A Skull in Connemara and Martin McDonagh’s Irish-English.” In The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan, 141–154. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Grene, Nicholas. 2000. “Black Pastoral: 1990s Images of Ireland.” Litteraria Pragensia 20 (10): 67–75. Hanly, Conor. 2006. An Introduction to Irish Criminal Law, 2nd ed. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Haughton, Miriam. 2012. “Merging Worlds: Place, Politics, and Play in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman.” In Focus: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies, 77–92. Pécs: University of Pécs.

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Jordan, Eamonn. 2014. From Leenane to LA: The Theatre and Cinema of Martin McDonagh. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Kurdi, Mária. 2006. “The Helen of Inishmaan Pegging Eggs: Gender, Sexuality and Violence.” In The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Lahr, John. 2006: “Blood Simple: The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” 93–94. New Yorker, 13 March. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/03/13/ blood-simple. Lanters, José. 2012. “Like Tottenham: Martin McDonagh’s Postmodern Morality Tales.” In The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh, by Patrick Lonergan, 165–178. London: Methuen. Lonergan, Patrick, 2009. Theatre and Globalisation: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Lonergan, Patrick. 2012. The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh. London: Methuen. Merriman, Victor. 1999. “Theatre of Tiger Trash.” Irish University Review 29 (2): 305–317. Middeke, Martin. 2010. “Martin McDonagh.” In The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Irish Playwrights, edited by Martin Middeke and Paul P. Schnierer, 213–233. London: Methuen. Morash, Christopher. 2002. A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Brien, Catherine. 2012. “In Bruges, Heaven or Hell?” Literature & Theology 26 (1): 93–105. O’Hagan, Sean. 2001. “The Wild West.” The Guardian, 24 March. https:// www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/mar/24/weekend.seanohagan. O’Toole, Fintan. 1997. “Murderous Laughter—The Leenane Trilogy,” 12. The Irish Times, 24 June. O’Toole, Fintan. 2018. “The In-Betweener,” Program Note, A Very Very Very Dark Matter. Bridge Theatre. Pilný, Ondřej. 2006. “Grotesque Entertainment: The Pillowman as Puppet Theatre.” In The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan, 214–223. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Pilný, Ondřej. 2018. “Did You Like How I Made That Turn, Officer? Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen and Capital Punishment.” In Boundaries, Passages, Transitions: Essays in Irish Literature, Culture and Politics in Honour of Werner Huber, edited by Hedwig Schwall, 93–100. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity. London: Penguin Books.

18  E. JORDAN Rankin Russell, Richard, ed. 2007. Martin McDonagh, A Casebook. London: Routledge. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Read, Alan, and Ben Fitzpatrick. 2006. Criminal Law, 3rd ed. London: Sweet & Maxwell. Rees, Catherine. 2009. “Representing Acceptability: Power, Violence and Satire in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” In Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick, 85–103. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Richards, Shaun. 2003. “The Outpouring of a Morbid, Unhealthy Mind: The Critical Condition of Synge and McDonagh.” Irish University Review 33 (1): 201–214. Rouse, Margitta. 2011. “‘Hit Men on Holiday Get All Medieval’: Multiple Temporalities and Media Theory in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges.” European Journal of English Studies 15 (2): 171–182. Sandel, Michael, J. 2009. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sen, Amartya. 2010. The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin. Sierz, Aleks. 2001. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber. Taylor, Paul. 2003. “Review of The Pillowman.” Independent, 17 November 2003. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/ the-pillowman-cottesloe-theatre-nt-london-736037.html. Wallace, Clare. 2006. Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity and Citation in 1990s New Drama. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia. Wallace, Clare. 2018. “Uncertain Convictions and the Politics of Perception.” In Boundaries, Passages, Transitions: Essays in Irish Literature, Culture and Politics in Honour of Werner Huber, edited by Hedwig Schwall, 61–70. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Weitz, Eric. 2012. “Sleight of Frame: Exploitations of Comic Feeling by Two Irish Playwrights.” In Staging Thought: Essays on Irish Theatre, Scholarship and Practice, edited by Rhona Trench, 139–152. Oxford: Peter Lang. Worthen, Hanna, and W.B. Worthen. 2006. “The Pillowman and the Ethics of Allegory.” Modern Drama 49 (2): 155–173. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ modern_drama/v049/49.2worthen.html.

CHAPTER 2

Incompetence and Corrupt Agents of the State

Abstract  This chapter looks at a range of formally diverse plays that deal with the practices, outcomes and implications of state activities and the actions of its agents in transactions of criminal justice. There is the almost complete absence of justice in Inishmaan in relation to incidents of sexual violation of children and serious investigative incompetence in dealing with the death of Mags in Beauty Queen. On the other hand, sinister policing practices exist in Skull, where evidence is tampered with, and a suspect is unafforded the presumption of innocence. In Hangmen a former state executioner deploys rough-house interrogation tactics and turns to the techniques he knows best from his career in order to extract information from a character regarded as the chief suspect in the disappearance of his daughter. Keywords  State investigations · Matricide Disinterment · Capital punishment

· Inquests · Uncertainty ·

Introduction It is an orthodoxy to assume that the norms and conventions of natural or poetic justice are regularly pursued and encouraged in drama, literature, film, television and popular culture, even in the face of chaos and carnage. Representations of investigative policing in contemporary television and cinema, particularly in outputs from Hollywood and Netflix © The Author(s) 2019 E. Jordan, Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30453-9_2

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to British broadcasters, including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, more often than not deliver the gold standard practices and outcomes in terms of criminal investigation, arrest, caution, charge and prosecution. Crimes are solved, justice is done and seen to be done. Television and cinema audiences are accustomed to their entertainment regularly opening with a focus on the intense panic of a victim(s), who valiantly struggles but is unfortunately incapable of evading, overcoming or fleeing from an (un)identified perpetrator. If the viewer does not directly witness the victim’s violation they may do later by way of flashback. Either this scenario or the accidental discovery of human remains, recently or long interred, gives rise to a swift gathering of law enforcement officers, sometimes rescue services, and crime scene investigators. Surrounding areas are swiftly cordoned off, rubber-neckers and/ or concerned citizens gather nearby, and someone closely related to the deceased may appear. And often, it is a killing that either links back to other murders or a murder that will lead to further atrocities. When it comes to the gathering of evidence, attention to detail is to the fore, whether the investigators are hardened by experience or are relative novices to such work. Such forensic focus on the minutiae leads to the expectation that the seen or unseen, known or unidentified killer(s) will be pursued and caught. Evidence is hardly ever tampered with or statements falsified. The veracity of witness testimony is essential. Often investigators may be less than fastidious in their daily lives and their relationships with others are chaotic. Even though the self-destructive patterns of those investigating may hinder, they never undermine the administration of a demanding and impartial justice. As the stakes rise, and the cat and mouse game between detective and killer intensify, predator and prey roles are frequently inverted. Family and friends, colleagues and allies of the protagonist are threatened, endangered, sometimes killed, but normally abducted to stall justice. Fringe figures might be blackmailed, coerced, intimidated, silenced or even framed for a crime they did not commit. However, false alibis and falsified information will eventually come unstuck. The gathering of data, the pursuit of financial transactions and the analysis of CCTV footage are all done with purpose and determination. The objectives the agents of justice have are simply to apprehend and put a stop to the horrific actions of the antagonist or cluster of antagonists before the cycle of killing escalates even further.

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Such killers may be initially fortunate in their evasion of the law, but they bring a scrupulousness that counters any earlier, frenzied homicidal actions. In most instances there is an escalation in the carnage that they cause. On occasion, support for the antagonist may come from blackmailed/disreputable law enforcers, unethical politicians or wealthy entrepreneurs, each of which will be exposed as corrupt and are likely to be held accountable for their actions. Battles with superiors tend to be about the release of financial and human resources to best investigate the crime, but seldom are they about restraints that might ultimately hinder the detection of the criminal. Detective work sometimes will take the protagonist and his/her allies to the limits of the law, and sometimes illegal means are chosen, with routine rights violated in order to serve the better good, but it is presented as a cost worth paying—a last resort means to achieve justice. What applies to lone wolf, marginalised murderers/serial killers, also applies more broadly to corrupt political figures, diplomats and leading lights in industry, finance, science, technology, the military and the police, where there is a more widespread conspiracy. The innocence of all suspects is presumed until proven otherwise. Means, motive and opportunity are painstakingly established. Upon arrest, suspects’ rights are read and respected and they are interrogated appropriately. Custodial interviews are impressively recorded, and legal representation is present unless a detainee waives that right. Nothing is excessively coerced, as confessions made in custody can easily become inadmissible, therefore stringent standards apply. Once arrests and charges are made, although it remains the responsibility of the prosecution services to assess the merits of the case, a threshold of evidence is invariably achieved, as to whether it is likely to stand up in court. Then it is up to the courts to adjudicate on guilt, with unbiased, unintimidated and impartial jurors and judges. Witnesses seldom disappear or change testimony. There is never a signalling that a suspect will get away on a technicality, as often he/she will have confessed to their crimes or the proof is overwhelming. Expectations of a fair trial, the presumption of innocence, and the realisation of the gold standard of truth are based on an oath, to “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” (or variations thereof). Failure to honour such an oath is punishable in terms of perjury. Objective, impartial justice is needed for guilt to be established beyond reasonable doubt and for the perception of justice as fairness to win out. Punishments imposed will be unquestionably honourable and impartial.

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Justice is sometimes served by the killing of the source of evil, usually through armed combat or a shoot-out that is based on a kill or be killed rationale—and self-defence is the ultimate cover for the death of a suspect. Alternatively, having the perpetrator die before facing trial takes out any uncertainty. Overall, solving crimes is a victory for teamwork, maverick thinking, unconventional and persistent detecting skills that leave no stone unturned. Law enforcement is signalled as reliable, effective, conclusive, affording certainty and closure in most representations. On the few occasions that crimes are not solved, the guilty remain at large in the anticipation of a follow-up film or series, where they will eventually face the rigours of the law—so assurances tend to be offered with the “until next time” approach. If victimisation is to persist and not be resolved, it is always sentimentalised, has future value and whatever is currently lacking in the world imagined, and whatever injustice is perpetuated, justice is still privileged and deemed worth pursuing courageously in the longer term. Whatever the current failures of the law, the spectator is reassured that any systemic failures will eventually be corrected. There are obstacles and tensions, but little will stop justice taking its course, and to be seen to be taking its course, a victory for the good over the deviant, corrupt and the bad. Such outcomes of justice carry a coded inevitability that spectators seem to anticipate, or at least have been trained by genre-repetitions to hold. Tinkering with the formulae can leave some audiences aggrieved, and demanding expectations of closure. (Convention-expectations lead to perhaps more lax forms of spectatorship?) For example, forensic integrity is at the core of BBC’s Silent Witness and Waking the Dead, both long-running series. A series like Line of Duty deals with conscientious, vigilant anti-corruption police officers investigating crimes committed by its own members, through alliances with organised crime gangs. Numerous other programmes could be cited to support the general pattern of investigation/closure I just outlined. However, ITV’s Unforgotten and Channel 4’s No Offence are slightly contrary examples, in the former in series two detectives do not progress with the charging of people guilty of murdering a paedophile, and in the latter, the husband of the leading detective inspector is a serial killer whose death is covered up, a killing brought about by a victim who had earlier evaded his capture, in the name of a greater justice. And in Luther, the investigating detective has some suspect associations

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and motives that are not always benign, even if he does serve victims of crimes. That said, and those exceptions aside, overwhelmingly, crime does not pay, detection rates are close to perfection (unlike real life), convictions and punishment are the rewards of justice. (The reality of criminality is radically different to that, with many permanently evading the reach of the law.) Truth and retribution serve as the reward for those who trust in the process of justice. There are very few miscarriages of justice. Perversions of the course of justice are anomalies, outliners that are invariably corrected. Justice is smoothed, sanitised, made palatable, seldom toxic and unbridgeable. The law itself seldom comes under scrutiny. However, in his early work in three out of the four plays premiered in 1996–1997 that are discussed in this chapter, McDonagh does something unsettling and radically different with the conventional idea of criminal justice. Initially, as his work is closely associated with Ireland, and given the fact that McDonagh predominantly featured as an “Irish (second-generation) writer” it is important to note how his writing is different to Irish dramaturgy’s general obsession with colonial (cold case) victimhood (it is easy to point the finger elsewhere, without, rather than within), and there is a general unwillingness to write the types of political drama that you get in British theatre, about civic duty, public accountability and the corruption of authority figures. (The predisposition towards identity-led Irish playwriting has led to particular critical attacks.) The Irish tendency to write state-of-the-nation plays has been often more in the eyes of scholars and critics than the writers themselves. Individual conflicts do relate to broader issues, but it is mainly through metaphor, allegory and synecdoche audiences are left to extrapolate back to and find relevance in the real. McDonagh’s early work is marked by crimes unsolved, investigative incompetency and corruption, and by the remarking upon various miscarriages of justice.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane: Investigative Incompetency and Genre Punishment The Beauty Queen of Leenane opened in 1996 in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre, followed by a short national tour, before transferring to London’s Royal Court. The play won many major awards, and in 1998 it transferred to the Walter Kerr Theater, New York, where it was

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nominated for six Tony awards, winning four. Beauty Queen remains regularly performed. Beauty Queen is set in a space that seems to possess all the trappings of a traditional Irish play with an isolated cottage environment, combining run-down furniture, a crucifix, images of Robert and John F. Kennedy. Such traditional spaces invite particular dramatic expectations, one of which is the dysfunctional relationship between either the puritanical and domineering matriarch/patriarch and the put-upon and overwhelmed daughter/son, who yearns for freedom. McDonagh exploits such a scenario, enticing spectator anticipations in alignment with genre patterns and conventions, and then he slowly undermines such expectations. A basic realism makes way for something almost surreal, inspired in part by a blend of melodrama, fairy tale and Grand-Guignol. In McDonagh’s world, tradition and kitsch slowly but surely misalign. Fintan O’Toole summarises it as: The country in which McDonagh’s play is set is pre-modern and postmodern at the same time. The 1950s is laid over the 1990s, giving the play’s apparent realism the ghostly, dizzying feel of a superimposed photograph. All the elements that make up the picture are real, but their combined effect is one that questions the very idea of reality. (1999, xi)

The elderly mother Mag is in her 70s, and her 40-something-year old virgin daughter Maureen’s passive-aggressive stance towards her mother is unnerving, but is also queasily playful, and a touch sinister. There is something practised, routinised and fundamentally understood going on between them, but, initially, it is not quite shared with an audience/ reader. In performance, dialogue and physicality can establish the degree of Maureen’s frustration with her mother’s coercive demands and a sense that Mag’s incapacitations are somewhat exaggerated. Noticeable is how Mag draws attention to her scalded hand, that Maureen bullies her mother by throwing away unfinished food, hinting at elder abuse. A conversation late in the first scene has Maureen revealing fantasies about a murderer travelling down from Dublin to kill her mother: “[I]f he clobbered you with a big axe or something and took your oul head off and spat in your neck, I wouldn’t mind at all, going first”—that is to die (BQ, 6). Are these exchanges symptomatic of a simply bitter routine, contrivance or artifice, garnered by repetition? It is hard to tell. Is there sympathy for both characters, for one over the other, or antipathy

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towards both? Both are seemingly locked into patterns of disputation, intimidation and defiance. Yet, provocations die down all too easily, sparks of rage and anger strangely dilute. There is a war between them of sorts, but it is not easy to see the rights and wrongs of it all or what is at stake. In scene two, after Mag has sadistically attempted to hide an invitation to a party, Maureen force-feeds her Complan (a nutritional supplement). Mag’s cruel determination is for Maureen to remain single and without intimacy, so that her daughter can look after her; Maureen’s brutal treatment causes audience unease. The stakes seem to be getting higher, but the cruelties exchanged are again dissipated by an offer to travel together to Westport for Maureen to buy a new dress. The pattern of conflict escalates to a point of intensity and then plummets rapidly; it seems to be their routine, their everyday. In the aftermath of a night with Pato, who was too drunk to have sex with Maureen, Mag’s cruelty towards her daughter is further exposed in her telling of Maureen’s history of mental illness and her habit of force-feeding her lumpy Complan. Maureen’s accusations about Mag pouring urine down the sink, and the stench that Pato has already noted confirms this transgression to be factually accurate, and audiences have served as witnesses. Mag’s triumphant showing of the release letters from the Difford Hall mental institution to Pato does not deter Maureen, as she is not in denial of the breakdown. Maureen refutes accusations of torture, based on Mag’s inability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Maureen’s admission to the first accusation of mental breakdown serves to affirm whatever Mag can absolutely prove, but Maureen’s denial of the second more serious accusation is not connected to the fact that Maureen is truthful in the first instance. If Mag’s claim is untrue then it is an outrageous accusation, if true, then she has been the victim of grievous bodily harm. On the evening of Pato’s going away party before he emigrates to Boston, Mag’s attempt to rile Maureen gives her pleasure, but her smugness trips her up. Having destroyed a letter from Pato inviting Maureen to join him in Boston, in which he also discusses his inability to have sex during their night together, she reveals knowledge of Maureen’s secret. How Mag should know of the circumstances of this night shared together leads to a scene of extreme excess and forced confession. Maureen’s implements of torture, hot oil and rubber gloves, are readied, so that she can force her mother to tell the truth. Hot cooking

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oil is poured on Mag’s hands and what remains is thrown into her lap. Resistance is futile, but the pain generated is not staged with an intent towards making it look authentic in any of the productions of the play that I have seen, including Hynes’s various productions (1996, 2000 and 2016) and Joe Gibbons Hill’s 2010 Young Vic production which toured to Dublin in 2011. The Grand-Guignolesque torture scene and the revelation of Mag’s death which follows, plus Maureen’s shift in consciousness towards madness diverts the play away from the real. During the play’s final scene, Ray Dooley confirms that Pato is now engaged to another woman, that Maureen could not have seen him off from the train station; indeed, there is no station in the vicinity. Maureen has created a false consciousness, partly triggered by a breakdown, but also by crossing a threshold by murdering her mother. With suitcase packed, Maureen has nowhere to go. Instead she is left alone in the house, serving as her own jailor. Her dreams of escape prove unrealisable. In this instance, the matricide affirms how tenuous the distinction between perpetrator and victim can be in McDonagh’s work. Just as troubling, if not more so, is the fact that the inquest into Mag’s death accepts Maureen’s preposterous explanation as to how her mother died, that she had accidentally fallen over. Inquests are triggered by sudden, unexpected, unexplained, unnatural or violent deaths and cover accidents, suicides and homicides, and determine whether the cause of death was natural or unnatural, but do go so far as to not establish criminal liability. A spectator might wonder why remnant wounds on Mag’s corpse would not raise suspicions during a post-mortem examination that a coroner would demand, or why would Mag’s more recent head wound and burnt hand not incite police investigation? Forensic analysis might well be expected to have been conducted on likely household objects that could be the source of such a fatal head wound. Flagrant institutional failings in marshalling basic evidence and in determining retributive justice for the slain Mag are made very obvious. Such failures of justice are countered by the play’s dramaturgical imperative to punish; justice is reached by other means, fashioned by the script’s indebtedness to melodrama and its dramaturgical inclinations, as with those of fairy tales, to rely on moral polarisations and the application of their genres’ imperatives to apply a clear-cut model of reward and punishment. Maureen is penalised in multiple ways; first, she is struck by a form of dissociative madness, second, she cannot reverse the loss of her

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potential suitor/rescuer, third, she is essentially imprisoned within her own home, and finally, she effectively metamorphizes into her mother, taking on Mag’s gestural and behavioural characteristics, including confusion and forgetfulness. Maureen is left uncannily rocking as her mother had done in the armchair, abandoned and insane. If Maureen has transgressed one law, Mag has contravened another, rather than fostering and enabling her child/ daughter’s maturation, she has inhibited, even destroyed, the prospects of her offspring. Within a fairy tale consciousness, Mag has repressed and victimised not a young adult, but a middle-aged daughter; depriving her of independence, joy, sexual intimacy and pleasure. In denying Maureen either social, physical or psychological connection to others and a life purpose, Mag’s destruction is the inevitable outcome of such prohibitions. If the law does not deliver an appropriate form of justice, the play’s dramaturgy does for Mag. The set has an embroidered tea-towel, which bears the inscription “May you be half an hour in Heaven afore the Devil knows you’re dead” (BQ, 1). This is both a humorous notion but also something that summarises the idea that punishment and damnation can somehow be evaded. Indeed, the fudging of responsibility and the circumvention of just desserts is the perversity and the aspiration, but is also a shared perspective, which binds the characters. In the delusion that fate in terms of damnation/salvation can be eluded, the implications apply both to morality and legal codes of criminal justice.

A Skull in Connemara: Falsification, Corruption and Unreasonable Doubt A Skull in Connemara was premiered by Druid Theatre Company in 1997 and transferred to the Royal Court in the same year. The play takes its title from one of Lucky’s lines in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). In Skull, Mick Dowd has served a custodial sentence for his part in the death of his wife, Oona, who lost her life when the car in which the couple were occupants crashed into a wall. His version of the incident has not waivered, but his account that it was merely an accident brought on by drinking alcohol and nothing more is not entirely accepted by those living in the locality. Rumour, innuendo, slights and aspersions intimate that Mick had murdered his wife and then staged the

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crash to look like an accident. This public account, which is at odds with Mick’s version and the inquest’s findings, serves as a reminder that justice may not have been done or have been seen to be done. More generally, this is a community rampant with stories of low-grade dishonesty. Lies, deception, mistruths and manipulation, rather than their opposites, serve as the common currencies of everyday expression and cohesion, compounded by the community’s uncertainty about its own responses to acts of criminal violation, perpetuated by males and females, towards humans and animals. The religious custom/practice is to disinter remains and move them from the graveyard after seven years in the ground to free up limited burial space—a job Mick is annually assigned to do by the local priest. (See Jordan [2012, 447–461] on the relationship between disinterring and Irish funerary practices.) Mick offers differing accounts as to what he does with the remains. One account is serene and respectful, with the bones placed in the lake accompanied by prayers, another is sacrilegious, with the bones ground up and dumped in a slurry pit. While seemingly oath-bound not to divulge what he does with the remains, such an obligation serves merely as a convenience, not as a pillar of communal value. Like Mick, characters are prone to spin facts, manipulate situations, and offer contradictory accounts of doings and thought processes, in other words, there is a degree of exaggeration and unreliability to all that is spoken. But more than that, lies, deceptions, hearsay and truth are almost undifferentiated. That is not the same as postmodernism’s comfort with and refusal to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and delusion. Uncertainty is a burden that this play delights in, and no more so than in matters of justice. This community bares the traces of previous attempts to link justice, in terms of innocence and culpability, to a Christian ethos, whereby confession, contrition, penance, and absolution interconnect. From this standpoint, forgiveness and the absence of absolution, and salvation and eternal punishment offer an alternative system of justice. Consequently, “Against God” is a phrase that is recycled across Skull and many of McDonagh’s west of Ireland plays. The sanctity of the confession box is the first port of call for Maryjohnny Raftery, as she interrogates Mick as to why he has not attended confession in seven years, and unburdened his soul about the circumstances of Oona’s death. Regardless of whether he goes to confession or not, Oona will still drag Mick’s soul to hell; based

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on Maryjohnny’s logic; the act of confession is a waste of time. Maryjohnny’s comments must be seen in light of her expectation of damnation for those that urinated on sanctified church ground. This unusual response becomes more bizarre on the discovery that those destined for such a fate were merely five-year-olds when they committed that allegedly blasphemous transgression. In this instance, the punishment does not fit the crime, and logic, consistency, proportionality, some of the hallmarks of justice, are entirely absent. One must not simply think theologically but humorously in response to Maryjohnny’s lines: “… I’ll tell you when I’ll let bygones be bygones. When I see them burned in Hell I’ll let bygones be bygones and not before!” (SC, 65). Mick’s countermove is based on her need to address sins related to “impure thoughts?” and “Thou shalt not steal” (SC, 66). Mocking her under the catch-all phrase of “impure thoughts” and small-time dishonesties signal Maryjohnny’s cheating at bingo and her charging tourists for maps supposed to be handed out for free from the tourist board; these seem to be accusations not on his scale, but the fact that he attempts to give these equal merit is part of the challenges of the ranking of sin, mortal or venial, in Catholic terms. Maryjohnny does admit to breaking the rules about how many books of bingo she plays on any night, but she has both excuses and justifications. A context of confession within a Catholic framework sets the backdrop to the other form of confession, those associated with the criminal justice system. Additionally, Mairtin’s tale about getting expelled from school after a hamster was cooked in an oven leads to a particular miscarriage of justice, as Blind Billy Pender is forced to confess to a crime he did not commit. Local police officer, Thomas Hanlon, Mairtin’s brother, believes that Mick is guilty of Oona’s murder, and wants him to face belatedly the courts on that charge. Thomas is obsessed with extracting a confession from Mick and will go to any lengths to do so. Indeed, Thomas has suspicions about some of the unexplained deaths in his locality. He is awaiting promotion before he can investigate what he deems the suspicious death of a fat man, discovered naked, with only a head of lettuce and a pot of jam in the fridge. Another curious case involves a man who drowned in his own urine. A suspicious mind, curiosity and persistence are some of the traits shared by the many maverick investigative figures from television and popular culture to whom Thomas relates, characters in Quincy, and Petrocelli. His inability to distinguish between hearsay

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and circumstantial evidence is one of the play’s numerous gags that mark out his incompetence. (Thomas calls to mind Detective Truscott in Joe Orton’s Loot [1965].) Mairtin is quick to point out that Thomas would not notice a shoplifting child, even if his face was covered in chocolate, and indeed he would be more likely to charge the child with the assassination of the Kennedys (John F. and Robert). That line is said in accusative jest, but it is a reminder of just how this police officer is perceived. Hearsay has it that Thomas broke the toes of Ray, while held in custody. Mick states that Ray Dooley got arrested for slashing the tyres of a guard’s car outside a disco in Carraroe, and an unidentified third party was seen running away. Mairtin’s response is telling: Mairtin: I had a bad leg anyways, and what were the guards doing in the disco that time of night anyway is what I’d like to know. Mick: Routing out the yobbos who started the bottle fight that the two wee girls got taken the night to hospital from. Mairtin: Well you’d think they’d have something better to do with their time (SC, 70–71).

A manipulation of detail and an avoidance of facts are default settings for Mairtin, but they are indicative also of the world of the play itself. There is “no will towards truth”, but towards deception, and the police are a force of which to be suspicious. Without the permission of the courts, Thomas disinters the remains of Oona and he has cajoled and bribed his brother into breaking the law, by getting Mairtin to assist him. Further, Thomas tampers with evidence, cracking open Oona’s skull to suggest that Oona died from injuries inflicted by Mick. Like Mags in Beauty Queen, Mairtin self-implicates himself by revealing that the rose locket that Oona was buried with proved to be worthless in a Galway pawn shop. Prior to this revelation, Mick had looked Mairtin in the eye and believed that Mairtin was not involved in the removal of her remains, based on visual cues, body language and emotional feedback. Mairtin had lied under this interrogation, and Mick had fallen for it. Bias, attribution, and expectation are revealed to be aspects of any interrogation process, and wanting or not wanting to believe something gets in the way of objective facts. A shirt and wooden mallet covered in blood visible to an audience during the opening moments of scene four suggest that Mick has more

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than likely wounded Mairtin, after both had taken a drive in Mick’s car, with a very drunk Mairtin at the wheel. The blood seems be the consequence of the rage that Mick had towards Mairtin as they left the cottage. Mick has the means, motive and opportunity to hurt Mairtin. Not noticing the blood-soaked clothing worn by Mick, Thomas claims that Oona’s skull suddenly appeared in one of his family’s fields, and he carries such evidence around in a plastic bag, not quite following basic protocol. Additionally, Thomas makes allegations about Mick not in private but in front of a civilian, his grandmother, Maryjohnny. Notable also is the fact that Thomas also fails to read Mick his rights. Thomas is in breach of a range of best practices. Forethought is clearly not a strength. All too easily Mick offers to oblige Thomas and write a confession to a murder; it is not to Oona’s death but to Mairtin’s. The return of Mairtin and his claims that his injuries were not caused by Mick but as the result of an accident, leaves Mick’s admission of guilt uncorroborated. Mick’s uncoerced confession is as close to the truth as we might have anticipated, as a spectator or reader. There seems no good reason why he would falsely implicate himself. Here notions of coerced, freely given and false confession meet in complicated ways. Thomas demands a confession in relation to one incident, but Mick gives one in relation to another, and Mairtin’s re-appearance makes Mick’s admission factually untrue, but there is little doubt that Mick did harm Mairtin, merely he gets the degree of grievousness incorrect. If Mairtin is refusing to allow Mick to be charged, justice cannot proceed. Is there a reason as to why Mairtin fails to implicate Mick? Perhaps, Mairtin accepts that he did wrong by way of assisting in the stealing of Oona’s remains, and that he somehow deserves to be punished? Maybe Mairtin has forgotten what happened due to concussion? Either way, the only crime Mairtin is willing to offer a witness statement about is Thomas’s illegal disinterring activities and his tampering with Oona’s skull. Mick’s setting fire to the confession to erase the written evidence suggests a conniving mindset. In light of the above scenario, plus Thomas’s illegality, what might an audience now make of Mick’s account of Oona’s death? Readers/audiences have witnessed him destroy evidence, know he had intent to hurt Mairtin, but do not find out exactly what happened. Mick’s motives for killing Oona are not clear-cut. Allegedly, her deficiencies as a partner are incidental ones, poor at making scrambled eggs, not covering up bread and cheese after use. By the end of the play,

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there seems to be nothing additionally added: no deep hatred signalled, no Strindbergian-type couple hostilities, no love triangles or infidelities hinted at, no intense battles over children or assets. Based on Mick’s preparedness to confess to Mairtin’s death, it would be a fallacy to connect this willingness as an affirmation of an innate, truth-imperative. Evidence of seeming reliability and consistency in one instance does not invite the conclusion that he always behaves thus. I will be returning to confessional statements again in relation to ones made by Davey (Inishmore), Katurian (Pillowman), and Mooney (Hangmen), each account is suspect, for a variety of reasons, such as duress, false promises, manipulation, and/or torture. Let us not forget the comedy associated with the moment Mick agrees to write his confession; as Thomas has no pen, Maryjohnny produces a fluorescent pen she uses for bingo and Mick provides his own lucky Lotto pen instead. It is Thomas who strangles Mick, after he admits to Mairtin’s murder, and later it is Thomas who strikes Mairtin twice across the head with a mallet. As there are witnesses to his violence, if anyone can face charges, it is likely to be him, if they would testify. As the play ends, Maryjohnny claims that she had seen something on the night of Oona’s death, that up to now she had withheld. Nobody has coerced her into that silence. Mick simply claims that what she witnessed is immaterial. Maybe she did see something, maybe it is her way of threatening Mick, maybe it is her way of blackmailing Mick to be silent as to what has just transpired between Thomas, Mairtin and himself, as she may want neither scandal nor criminal investigation? Or maybe it is her way of cadging drink in the future? It could be a fundamental piece of evidence or something that would fall apart under cross-examination. As credible witnesses go, she does not fit the bill. In this instance, as it is throughout the play, her motives are multiple, ambiguous, uncertain. Whether Maryjohnny is lying, bluffing, manipulating or telling the truth is not ascertained. If truth needs to be established and needs to be seen to be established as a prerequisite of criminal justice, truth remains uncertain in Skull. If due process and beyond reasonable doubt are basic legal benchmarks, such a high degree of certainty protects the innocent and places the onus on the administrators, investigators and prosecutors of justice to meet these exacting standards. In Skull, chaos flourishes in terms of the determination of facts, and maliciousness and corruption reign at the core of the administration of justice.

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In performance, while Tom’s characterisation is invariably realised for comic effect, it emerges that there is something additionally dark to him and his unethical policing strategies impact on how he is received. His illegal attempts to take justice into his own hands marks out a maverick form of action that is re-configured by many later characters in McDonagh’s works. If as in most film and television work audiences are used to accountability being invariably established and asserted, and closure revealing what has definitively happened, here in Skull the truths of events are not affirmed.

The Cripple of Inishmaan: Fetishised Lawlessness and Justice in Abeyance The Cripple of Inishmaan premiered on 7 January 1997 at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe stage in London, was later transferred to its larger Lyttleton auditorium on 30 April 1997. The premier was directed by Nicholas Hytner. Inishmaan has gone on to be performed consistently since its first production. From instance, Garry Hynes directed it for Druid Theatre in 2008 and again in 2011 to critical acclaim. Michael Grandage’s commended West End production in 2013 starred Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe as Billy, and Sarah Greene as Helen, a production that transferred to Broadway the following year. Inishmaan relies on the filming of Robert J. Flaherty’s documentary-film Man of Aran (1934) as its significant inciting incident and as its central intertext. [Cripple] Billy Claven initially travels away from home to a nearby island to witness/partake in the filming process, a journey that next results in him going to Hollywood for a screentest. Somewhat like the fantastical film-within-a-film in In Bruges (2008) that is not quite an homage to Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Flaherty’s iconic work functions as a film-within-a-play, but also serves as one strand of McDonagh’s querying of Irishness as a construct and as a projection, as well as to interrogate how a fetishised notion of imperilled authenticity can be problematic. While the play is in part about Billy’s risk-taking, growth, and triumphs against the odds, the work also maps his evolving relationship with (Slippy) Helen McCormick. Billy has lived with the Osbourne sisters, Kate and Eileen, who adopted him, after his parents died at sea. The sisters run a seemingly limited-stocked shop. Despite their over-protectiveness and

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best intentions, there is much insensitivity, even an abject fatalism to Kate and Eileen’s thinking and framing of Billy, something which is evident in Kate’s comment: “… Billy does have a sweet face if you ignore the rest of him” (3). They cannot envisage Billy ever consummating a relationship with anyone but an odd, simple or abnormal woman. There are a number of situations in the play where expressions and experiences of justice are complex, only some of which involve the play’s protagonist. Billy’s parents drown at sea during an attempt to kill their disabled child by tying a sack with stones in it to his body. While this crime has taken place long ago, there is no one survivor to hold accountable for the cruel deed. In order to address Billy’s physical incapacities that needed immediate hospital attention, local gossip Johnnypateenmike steals his mother’s savings, and as it turns out, Johnnypateenmike is also Billy’s rescuer from the sea. In his everyday encounters, Johnnypateenmike is quick to threaten the “polis,” but his complaints to the police about Babbybobby assaulting him are not taken seriously, so claims of grievous bodily harm go un-investigated. Other criminal acts stay unaddressed; Helen is a hit woman of sorts, but she remains at large, having executed a goose and a cat, paid for by feuding, gay male lovers. There are consequences to Babbybobby’s violent beating of Billy, as he is arrested, an assault prompted by the fact that Billy had manipulated him into giving him a boat ride. If there is a perception of a wild west, and a generally, deficient and if not quite absolute lawlessness, the lack of accountability is made especially unnerving by the various alleged sexual assaults that go unpoliced. Experiences by Helen and her brother, Bartley, expose the play to the issues of sexual assault, victimisation, and the lack of protection for the vulnerable. The play humorously contrasts Helen’s aggressive self-defence tactics in the face of inappropriate sexual attention from ­ predatorial priests, which with Bartley’s timid and passive response. Helen’s remark that the only penises she has seen belong to priests, who persist in exposing themselves to her, is a reveal intended to be a provocative and unnerving one. Helen claims that at the age of six she ruptured a curate and that she has flung eggs at Father Barratt after he touched her backside during choir practice. Lynn Gardner aptly describes Kerry Condon’s performance as Helen in Hynes’s 2008 production as fierce as a polecat, for she is a young woman “who has learned to ferociously protect herself” (2008).

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Against expectation, McDonagh allows Helen to equate such predatorial interests in her as a measure of her attractiveness, and her casualisation of such inappropriate touching seems not to have been consciously traumatic for her. Furthermore, there is provocation, excess and bravado in Helen resorting to “self-help justice” (99) to use Steven Pinker’s term, but the astuteness of McDonagh’s comic instinct is not simply to downplay the trauma of violation, merely to re-configure and elaborate on it through Helen’s ultra-defiance. Helen’s inability to call on the law gives rise to a futility without shame. Bartley has also experienced somewhat similar, perhaps even more extensive levels of sexual intrusion. To fight back is not Bartley’s reflex, rather, it is to freeze. For Bartley, it was not his rear end that was groped, and he claims that predators are not simply drawn to Helen because of her looks, rather it is down to having a small physique and being alone. Laurence Kinlan, who played Bartley in both of Hynes’s productions, delivered these lines with telling vulnerability, but what unnerves, is the absence of a substantial and collective response to his accounts of his ordeal. Sympathy and compassion are merely passing fragments, bearing neither the substance nor the empathy appropriate to such revelations. When Bartley proposes that Billy’s disability would ensure his safety from such forms of abuse, not only is his distorted thinking exposed, but more than that, there is no sense that Bartley has an expectation of the wider social order delivering any form of restorative justice for him or anybody else. Remarks that Billy does not warrant the attention of paedophilic priests because of his disability, is as raw as it is unnerving, proving to be another example of how the uncanny and the abject (as I will later discuss) enter the comic frame. Paedophilic clergy members traditionally relied on the coerced silence of victims, on the general public’s refusal to believe vocal victims, and on a law’s unwillingness to enquire into, investigate or prosecute such behaviours appropriately. In Inishmaan everyone is in the know, and this is crucial. The “Polis” and the “Constabulary” remain an offstage force, vague, disembodied upholders of the institutions of the law, with seemingly no imperative, obligation or willingness to protect. Catholicism is equated with violation and anarchy. It is not that the west of Ireland is simply a space beyond the law, but that the law has absconded, it is inept because of its almost complete absence. In part its absence is there to not get in the way of violatory priests and is not there to protect the victims of injustice.

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The widespread revelations of systemic violations of children and young adults carried out by abusers associated with the Catholic Church that began to be reported in the 1980s are echoed here, as is the fact that many priests remained in their ministries with access to children, long after their violations were reported to the church hierarchy. Even when information was conveyed to the police, they often declined to investigate complaints, due to the absence of evidence, witnesses, time lapses, and sometimes, based on the most spurious of grounds. Systemic cover-ups exposed the double standards of religious communities, who failed to practise the moral tenets of responsibility, duty and social justice that it conveniently preached, based on the Gospels. Inishmaan’s historical and fictional collusion of church and the agents of law is as blatant as it is a horrific conspiracy of violation and non-protection. Set in 1934, when the 26-county Irish Free State was heading towards greater independence from British rule, accordingly the play’s ironic framing of the systemic violence and historic injustices, associated with British colonisation are telling. Johnnypateenmike is inspired to resist Babybobby’s torture, prompted by the example of Kevin Barry, the Irish political martyr, who held out against British forces, despite brutal torture. However, Johnnypateenmike capitulates almost instantly, after Babybobby pegs stones at him. However, colonial practices become even more blatantly and contentiously signalled when imperial violation is theatrically re-purposed by Helen. At Helen’s behest, she and Bartley play a game “Ireland versus England.” Bartley, as “Ireland”, stands still, as Helen breaks three eggs over his head. Colonial injustice is framed as a resistance-free defilement, and the male character is positioned as its inert victim, transgressing the usual trope of Ireland being represented symbolically as the passive, dispossessed and subjugated female icon. The comedically and insensitive staging of colonisation as a fundamental configuration of intrusive imperial power and as a breach of the inalienable right of a nation’s self-determination, can be viewed as both an articulation and subversion of imperialism’s fundamental injustice. Helen remarks: “There’ll be worse casualties than eggy hair before Ireland’s a nation once again …” (CI, 51). This dark enactment and her comment are particularly provocative in a work that premiered at the National Theatre. Countering this somewhat, in the script for the screen-test that Billy delivers, the dying Irishman’s sense of lack and dispossession are clearly mocked, by way of countering an aggressor/victim-only view of

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imperialism. Billy comes home during the showing of O’Flaherty’s film and in the productions I have seen, he is often made up to look like a character from that film. The heroic and stoic nature of Flaherty’s film foregrounds the survival strategies of people dealing with rough seas, and a soil that is not very fertile. Indeed, the characters’ need to draw earth from between rock crevices is one of the features of the film, as are the difficulties locals had fishing from the cliff tops or in pursuing a shark in inclement seas. Almost an ennobled, stoic resilience features, as a marker of survival, endurance and necessity, and must also be seen in light of the horrors of America’s Great Depression, to which it indirectly speaks. In Inishmaan, McDonagh’s characters are not quite anti-heroic, but are anything but stoic. The credulity of authenticity is undermined with the exposure that the shark fishing in the film is a long extinct practice, filmed to look as if it is a current phenomenon. Additionally, gendering of Irishness as predominantly male-orientated in Flaherty’s film is opposed by Helen’s demand for a film titled Lass of Aran. In Inishmaan, the police are not there to punish and discipline, but are notable by their absence, partly as a colluding force with violators, but also by their active indifference to crimes in the local area. A neo-colonial reading of the play may position Inishmaan’s policing in light of Ireland’s history at the experience of the British Government, its army, police force and judiciary, but the Irish Free State’s policing is found utterly wanting, not inept simply as a consequence of colonialism. Through interlinkage, historic injustice is mirrored by the absence or chaos of justice of the new jurisdiction. If rumour, innuendo and aspersions are widely circulated partially by way of insult and partly by way of entertainment within Leenane and Inishmaan communal settings, they are not exposed to the more telling tests of criminal justice, in terms of the presumption of innocence or truths established beyond reasonable doubt. Community stories also conceal a broader conspiracy of silence, that we will see in Lonesome, where the local priest realises that he has three potential murderers wandering freely within his community, and nobody offers the authorities any information to advance prosecution. The inability to believe in or achieve adequate justice outcomes are fundamental collective deficits. Each work thus far raises important issues around collective silence, collusion and the perversion of justice. Suspicions around policing abound. It is easy for young men in the locality like Mairtin (Skull) and Ray (Beauty Queen) to accuse the police of corruption as a reflex, and as they

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evoke other injustices the reach and scope of the plays become that bit more complex. In Skull, Tomas refutes Mairtin’s accusation of assaulting Ray. In Beauty Queen, Maureen debates with Ray: Maureen: Oh. Thomas Hanlon said what it was you kicked a door in just your socks. Ray: Did he now? And I suppose you believe a policeman’s word over mine. Oh aye. Isn’t that how the Birmingham Six went down. Maureen: Sure you can’t equate your toes with the Birmingham Six, now Ray. Ray: It’s the selfsame differ… (BQ , 53).

For Ray, police malpractice is police malpractice, but a wounded toe does not correspond to a gross miscarriage of justice suffered by those falsely accused of and imprisoned for planting bombs in Birmingham. Only someone keen to exaggerate his own victimhood would do so.

Hangmen: Miscarriages of Justice and Principles of Precarity Hangmen opened at the Royal Court in 2015, with Mathew Dunster directing a production that would transfer to Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End. An off-Broadway production by Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater in 2018 was warmly received in New York. Hangmen’s first scene is set in an English prison cell in the early 1960s—and is McDonagh’s only play to date entirely set in England. Condemned figure James Hennessy is executed by hanging, despite protestations of his innocence; an event overseen by prison officers, a doctor, warden, hangman and hangman’s assistant. Two years on, on the day that capital punishment is to be indefinitely put on hold, but not yet abolished in England, the location shifts to a pub in Oldham, managed by Alice Wade and her now redundant and surplus to requirements ex-hangman husband, Harry, who is disparagingly regarded as the second-best executioner in England. Harry is a poor second to the renowned Albert Pierrepoint; even Hennessy expresses a preference for Pierrepoint to serve as his executioner. With 233 executions to his name, Harry suggests to Clegg, a local journalist, that an asterisk be placed alongside the list of executions Pierrepoint carried out for war crimes committed during and after the Second World War. That way their scores

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would not be so far apart. In this public house, the drink is not great, and the customer is seldom if ever right, but the hangman is a gory fascination. After 15-year-old Shirley, Harry and Alice’s only daughter, goes missing, Harry turns to what he knows best to extract a confession from the chief suspect, Peter Mooney. Customers, including, Detective Chief Inspector Fry, passively and aggressively assist in the interrogation and torture of Mooney. Alice also participates in the unfolding events, her motherly instincts have told her with utter certainty that something awful has happened. Hearsay, circumstantial evidence and allegedly clearcut means, motive and opportunity harden into summary conclusions as to Mooney’s status as perpetrator, well beyond reasonable doubt. Syd, Harry’s former assistant, is in part the source of a good deal of that seemingly incriminatory information. While it can be said that there is some collusion between Mooney and Syd, the exact nature of their conspiracy is never clarified, nor are some other matters of importance. Mooney’s motives are less than clearcut, though he does insist that he has had some previous contact with Hennessy. However, according to Syd, he himself wanted to frighten Harry, take him down a peg or two, and make him pay for him losing his job and serving a jail sentence when found in possession of illegal pornography, thanks to Harry informing on him to the authorities. Syd improvises with the facts of the Hennessy case, embellishing it with details that are inaccurate but credible, proposing that a year after the crime Hennessy was accused of, a similar one took place in the same vicinity. This is intended to put Hennessy’s killing in doubt and to discommode Harry. Furthermore, Syd sent Mooney to lie to Harry. Mooney had told of his association with Norfolk. Again, it looks like red herring details are being falsely planted. Syd’s proposition that Hennessy had an alibi is dismissed by Harry as “Evidence from a tart!” (H, 62). Syd claims that he chose Mooney to get involved in this particular scam, to which Mooney counterclaims the opposite, so even on that particular detail there is no agreement. If Syd thinks he is in control of the “story”, Mooney proves him wrong. From the start of the play Mooney’s general provocations, antic-disposition and performances of menace are of crucial importance. Mooney queries if he himself is an “animal”, but then wishes to leave it to the courts to decide. Furthermore, Mooney suggests that although he has

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no criminal record, it is not possible to assume that he has not carried out any criminal acts. He may be good at getting away with them, again testing the division between guilt and innocence. Mooney uses a phrase like “couldn’t rape mud” to describe Hennessy in order to indicate a degree of menace (H, 71). Here is a character wanting to be disliked, despite the superficial charisma that he also exhibits. What Mooney says to Syd as to what he has done to Shirley evokes a presumption of guilt, rather than a presumption of innocence. The billy-stick used by Harry to break Hennessy’s resistance in the cell is also used on Mooney, and a beer-barrel rope serves as an alternative restraining agent. The unexpected showing up of Pierrepoint to challenge comments made about him by Harry and published in the local Oldham Gazette interrupts the interrogation and leaves Mooney almost out of sight, gagged, bound with rope around his neck, suspended from a beam, and balancing on a chair. Only his legs remain visible from behind a drape. When the chair collapses beneath this hanging man, all in the know respond with a recognition of the unfolding reality, but nobody goes to Mooney’s rescue. They will not risk exposure. Belated attempts to save Mooney, once Pierrepoint leaves, are just that. When Arthur demands to hang Syd next, adding “hang everybody,” his vigilante reflex is frightening (H, 102). All certainties as to the given circumstances collapse with Shirley’s frantic return from the dead so to speak. Her belligerence serves as great comic relief, whilst those in the pub differently face down the horrors of their actions, and spectators (quasi-jurors/witnesses perhaps) realise that their own presumptions about what has happened to her now need revisiting. (It is difficult to claim that Shirley is covering up as Mairtin does in Skull.) Shirley had sex with Mooney, and he fails to honour an arrangement to meet up at the train station. Detective Chief Inspector Fry refuses to help with the disposal of Mooney’s body, but will not testify as to what he has seen. The lynch mob is unlikely to go before the law courts. Mooney’s earlier admission to Syd that he has left Shirley balancing on a box of Weetabix with a rope around her neck is the deceitful confession of a manipulating figure, someone as intent on satisfying his own destructiveness as he is on testing the limits of the rationalities and disciplinary order of those who interrogate him. In showing up at the pub, and knowing the people suspect that he has abducted Shirley, Mooney’s actions are voluntary, if troubled and ill-considered. He

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effectively consents to his own torture, even perhaps initiates his own execution, however perverse that sounds. While Mooney consistently flaunts his disrespect for law and order, his rebellious spirit is destructive and sinister, and his actions are not just antagonistic and provocative, but obtuse. In Alan Parker’s The Life of David Gale (2003), an anti-capital punishment activist (Kevin Spacey) allows himself to be purposefully accused and executed for rape and murder. In the aftermath of his death, proof of his innocence is released; it had been a deliberate sacrifice to discredit capital punishment practices, based on standards of truth beyond reasonable doubt that had not been realised in that instance. Mooney operates outside of a simplistic trickster/scapegoat anarchic consciousness. Sandel’s reflections on the notion of consensual cannibalism are worth considering in relation to Mooney’s actions in relation to justice. If someone consents to cannibalism, and it is done voluntarily and without financial inducement, is there a crime, is it assisted suicide, a “killing on request” as the person claimed, or what happens if there is no law outlawing cannibalism in the first instance? We can only justify the action if there is a libertarian belief that we own our own bodies and can do as we wish with them as Sandel explains. The German courts decided otherwise in the case of the “Cannibal of Rothenburg,” Armin Meiwes, who was eventually found guilty of murder, and not just of manslaughter, as was the initial finding (2009, 74). While Ken’s altruistic sacrifice in Bruges happens without the expectation of reciprocation, there is little altruistic about Mooney’s actions, but he does allow himself to be tortured, without exposing his ruse. Mooney is neither a consensual victim willing to sacrifice himself for a greater good, nor simply a belligerent protester; he is more a contentious perverter of order, a non-altruistic lover of chaos. His false but apparently consensual admissions to be a perpetrator ensure that Mooney’s relationship with justice is especially antagonistic. Additionally, there is a pattern, in Inishmore, Davey is manipulated into making a false confession, and Pillowman’s Katurian falsely confesses to a series of killings, with the incentive that his stories will be preserved, knowing that he is facing execution regardless. Most of all, Mooney’s extra-judicial killing undermines, not only the presumption of innocence, but the idea of certainty being central to criminal justice, evident in the term, “beyond reasonable doubt,” which

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proponents of capital punishment have always relied upon to justify the termination of the life, despite the occasional discovery of new evidence that challenges the conviction or belated exonerations. Indeed the attempts to abolish capital punishment were hastened by a series of executions that troubled people in Britain, and such cases are signalled by Syd—namely Derek Bentley, who was later pardoned due to low intelligence, Timothy Evans, who got a posthumous pardon, as did Ruth Ellis, who was executed after she killed a violent lover (see also Pilný 2018, 94). Notably but also cautionary is the fact that links between Ireland and England were not picked up on by any of the press reviews of Hangmen that I have read to date. Pierrepoint was assistant executioner to his uncle in Irish jails; was responsible for the execution for treason of the notorious Nazi propagandist and Irish national with American citizenship, Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce), and he hanged Michael Manning, the last person executed by the Irish State. When consideration is given to the names of the characters in Hangmen, the specificity of the names seems to reflect the presence of an Irish diasporic population in Britain. The surnames Clegg, Fry and Wade are recognisable as English, but not distinctly English names. However, Phyllis Keane, the name of Shirley’s friend who is institutionalised—indeed falsely held against her will based on a committal by her father—is clearly an Irish name. Although Hennessy (Josef Davies) was played with a London accent in the first production of the play, his name is also an essentially Irish one. Further, Michael Coveney rightly connects Hennessy with “James Hanratty who was hanged by noose-man Harry Allen for the A6 murder in 1962” and sees Harry Wade as “a nominal amalgam of Allen and another prominent licensed strangler of the day, Stephen Wade” (Coveney 2015). The work of Pilný (2018) and Lanters (2018) offer extensive elaborations on the connections between the play’s characters, real executions, and the A6 case in particular. Both Pilný and Lanters mention how Syd Armfield is based on Sydney Dernley, an assistant executioner. Dernley, and how Harry Allen and Pierrepoint remained part of public discourse long after the abolition of capital punishment because of films, memoirs, documentaries and biographies. Hanratty killed Michael Gregsten and shot, raped and left paralysed, Valerie Storie. Many suggested that the Hanratty case was a major miscarriage of justice and it was not until 2002 when DNA testing confirmed that Hanratty was indeed the killer. Interestingly, a person called Peter Louis Alphon, who was initially detained as a suspect,

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came forward after Hanratty’s execution to lay claim to the murder. In Hangmen, Mooney’s name in the play is (Peter Aloysuis Mooney), as Lanters suggests, McDonagh takes something from Alphon’s outlandish public appearances, which history proved to be blatant lies; he was a deluded, attention-seeking provocateur, somewhat prompted by subversives, keen to undermine the judicial system (2018, 318–319). Although Hanratty was born in Kent and reared in London from an early age, his name and background are clearly Irish. Equally, Johnny Flynn played Mooney with a London accent in Dunster’s production, but Mooney is a name with very strong Irish associations. Read this way, a character with a London accent but with an Irish name, is hanged for a crime about which there is great uncertainty, and another Londoner with a distinctively Irish name dies during an illegal interrogation for a crime that never even took place. (This of course calls particular attention to the reluctance or complications in categorising McDonagh as an Irish writer, though reared in England and having a London accent. Nicholas Wright and Richard Eyre’s comments are revealing: “when McDonagh in his many media appearances turned out to be a chic young guy, wearing the nicest Armani suit you’ve ever seen and sporting a marked south London accent, bemusement turned to fury: ‘If this is an Irish playwright, I’m a banana’, cried the chorus” [2000, 227]). To regard McDonagh’s play as merely an anarchic attack on British justice would be a major inaccuracy. The regretful “combination of institutional lacunae and behavioural inadequacies” that Sen deplores are not just occasional but pervasive in this play, but also in the works analysed in the next chapters (81). People are at the mercy of democratic societies to do the right thing rather than propose an incredulity towards justice. As FitzPatrick Dean notes: “the death penalty … is still legal in thirty-eight American states,” and elsewhere around the globe (2018, 108). Characters in this section are at the mercy of an omnipresent if sometimes invisible state that seems to be as sinister as it is incompetent, while characters who are agents or ex-agents of the state show few restraints or inhibitions in their executions of the law, and instead invariably refuse to honour the spirit or letter of the law or see through on the virtues of justice.

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Works Cited Coveney, Michael. 2015. “Review: What’s on Stage.” 20 September. http:// www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/reviews/hangmen-royal-court-martin-mcdonagh_38762.html. Eyre, Richard, and Nicholas Wright. 2000. Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century. London: Bloomsbury. Fitzpatrick Dean, Joan. 2018. “Martin McDonagh’s Epistemological Instability: The Noose of Hangmen.” In Boundaries, Passages, Transitions: Essays in Irish Literature, Culture and Politics in Honour of Werner Huber, edited by Hedwig Schwall, 101–110. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. 43, no. 1. 44–59. Gardner, Lynne, 2008. “Review—The Cripple of Inishmaan.” The Guardian, 10 October. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/oct/10/theatre1. Jordan, Eamonn. 2012. “Heterotopic and Funerary Spaces: Martin McDonagh’s A Skull in Connemara.” In Focus, Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies, 63–76. Pécs: University of Pécs. Lanters, José. 2018. “There’s Ropes and There’s Ropes: The Moral and Textual Fibre of Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen.” Irish University Review 48 (2): 315–330. O’Toole, Fintan. 1999. “Introduction.” Martin McDonagh Plays: 1, ix–xvii. London: Methuen. Pilný, Ondřej. 2018. “Did You Like How I Made That Turn, Officer? Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen and Capital Punishment.” In Boundaries, Passages, Transitions: Essays in Irish Literature, Culture and Politics in Honour of Werner Huber, edited by Hedwig Schwall, 93–100. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity. London: Penguin Books. Sandel, Michael J. 2009. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sen, Amartya. 2010. The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin.

CHAPTER 3

Guilt Affirmation and Interfacing Alternative Systems of Justice

Abstract   This chapter looks at the determinations of guilt and innocence and how alternative systems of justice are posited. The psychopathic Kid character in Six Shooter is as near as McDonagh’s works come to the categorical establishment of guilt. The Lonesome West is considered in relation to the implications of the religious sacrament of penance accommodating the displacement and disavowal of criminal justice. In Bruges circulates rival, comparative and incompatible systems of justice in the determination of guilt and consequential punishments. The Pillowman’s totalitarian world view teases out issues of self-defence, mercy killings, and the interfaces between guilty act and guilty mind in a world of exaggerated, false and coerced confessions. Keywords  Guilt · Innocence · False confessions Storytelling · Religious iconography

· Totalitarianism ·

Introduction False, withdrawn, fabricated, coerced confessions and admissions that go unmade were discussed in the previous chapter. This section deals with Shooter, Lonesome, Bruges and Pillowman in light of the formulation and establishment of guilt beyond reasonable doubt, through substantiated evidence, disclosures, witness statements or divulgences by implication. Justice is still difficult to realise, on the one hand, complicated by © The Author(s) 2019 E. Jordan, Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30453-9_3

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self-punishment, self-destructiveness, self-sacrifice, avoidance strategies or the perpetual deferral of justice, and on the other, by the impositions and demarcations of rival systems of justice. Bruges begins with Ray’s unqualified admission of his guilt, in a confessional voice-over, which must be seen not only in the light of his genuine remorse but also in relation to the ironic but truthful revelations he offers Chloë (Clémence Poésy), by way of personal introduction; humour, admission and seduction meet head on. If the last chapter considered how corruption and miscarriages of justice undermine even the most rudimentary expectations of criminal justice, I will now start to consider how so many of the characters in McDonagh’s plays and films wish to offset state justice, and replace it with something else, which will become the dominant focus of analysis in Chapter 4. McDonagh is prone to combine systems of justice that do not easily align and through such interdigitisation, various possibilities and anomalies emerge, creating inconsistency yes, but an awareness that there are multiple calls often placed on justice from diverse, multifocal, rival and incompatible and not just ‘comparative’ perspectives, which Sen identifies as outlined in Chapter 1. In the four works discussed here, anarchic justice and comeuppance are incompatible with a sensibility surrounding justice relating to principles of honour and obligation that find expression in the world view of Bruges’s Harry, that echo but do not coincide with Sandel’s linkage of justice with duty, virtue and honour. Criminal justice is endlessly postponed in the Connor household in Lonesome, in their reliance on a Catholic form of confession as a substitute for the state’s legal mechanisms. Shooter’s Kid resists arrest, and his self-destructiveness has another motive—to bring down with him anyone else he can. Bruges’s Ken reflects on the nature of punishment, damnation and salvation, and opts for the ethos of saving the next child and not the retribution of Harry or of the state. In Pillowman the justice environment of a totalitarian state is not quite undone by the unnerving justice calls found in Katurian’s fairy tales.

Six Shooter: Self-Inflicted and Anarchic Justice Six Shooter (2005) is a 28-minute film that won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film as well as a number of other Irish and British film awards. For such a low budget film, and being

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McDonagh’s first attempt to direct, it is a considerable achievement. Production qualities and aesthetic skill are not of the standard of later work, yet the work remains particularly popular. The wife (Ann McFarlane) of Donnelly (Brendan Gleeson) has just died. According to a doctor (David Murray), a woman has been admitted to hospital with her head blown off, and two cot deaths occurred that same evening. Donnelly’s asking of the doctor if the decapitated woman is still alive, and his leaving of a photo of “David”, a rabbit, on his wife’s remains let the viewer know that we are in the territory of tragicomedy. Taking a train back home, Donnelly sits opposite a teenager named Kid (Rúaidhrí Conroy), despite it being an almost empty carriage. Costumed in a bright green shirt and brown jacket, Kid is accompanied by a toy monkey. Kid is played as a troubled, divisive, argumentative, irritating and contentious character, quick to insult and quicker to sift out offence. A degree of aggression is hinted at in his response to his own mother’s claim that one can be whatever one wants to be (the neo-liberal dream), as such a statement has its peculiar limitations: jockeys must be small in stature, ruling out those who are tall. If Donnelly does not know what to say at the start, Kid has too much to say. Insensitivity, rash, poor impulse control, self-aggrandisement, self-aggrievement, non-conformity to social norms are some of the traits that Simon Baron-Cohen has mentioned using Hervey Cleckley’s research on psychopathology and Kid displays most of these characteristics (46). It does not take long for Kid to intuit something troubling in the interactions of a nearby couple (Aisling O’Sullivan and David Wilmot), and once he discovers the cause of their trauma—a cot death—he cannot but impose himself onto the situation. In Kid’s comments: “Did they kill it” (SS, 7:13) and “Maybe they banged it on something” (SS, 7:15) the anarchic inappropriateness of his mindset is revealed. After all, he himself would do as much, bang an unruly child on something. He adds: “I’m surprised that mams and dads don’t kill their kids more often as most kids are rotten” (SS, 7:36). When the couple return to their seats, having gained a degree of composure, he calls out: “Here’s Fred and Rosemary” (SS, 8:19) after the serial killers, Fred and Rosemary West, who ran a house of horrors, killing multitudes, including their own children, teenagers, and ex-partners, an example I have already cited in Chapter 1. Alone with the mother, and seeing the photo of the child, Kid insults the baby’s facial features and remarks with homophobic intent upon the

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child’s possible sexual orientation, in aligning how the baby looks like Jimmy Sommerville of the gay pop group, Bronksi Beat. “No wonder you banged it on something” (SS, 11:38) implies that Kid understands not wanting to be “lumped with an ugly baby who’ll disgrace you” (SS, 11:47). This is crude projection, if a sinister summation and a false allegation cruelly made to someone in the depths of despair. Although compelled to respond to the accusation, Mrs. Dooley is not able to engage. Kid’s only self-caution is seen in the lines: “Was that a bit much now. I think you might have gone a bit overboard, fella” (SS, 12:35). His nonchalant and malevolent explanation to her husband that she “flung herself off the train five minutes back, dashed her brains to muck against a wall” (SS, 13:15) is so lacking in empathy that the husband’s first impulse is to disbelieve him; nobody could be that unconcerned, that unmoved. Prompted by Kid’s line “Just look out along the train, she’s dripping down the half of it” (SS, 13:28) Donnelly pulls the emergency cord—a humane reflex that distinguishes him from Kid. Kid’s riling of the mother is not necessarily the trigger of her suicide, but his behaviour lacks any sense of compassion or social obligation. This basic lack of empathy, lack of self-censorship, and unwillingness or inability to express transactional conversational niceties, especially a consideration for the bereaved, are details further unnerved by the darkly humorous intent of the lines spoken. Throughout, Conroy delivers a controlled, trickster-like, transgressive and sinister performance. Kid’s witness statement to the police officer that “she was acting like an oddball from as soon as she sat down, all crying like a mad thing” (SS, 13:50) again captures his limited insights, his utter lack of social sensitivity, his incapacity even to feign good citizenship temporarily, as Valene tries to do in Lonesome, on Fr Welsh’s announcement of Thomas Hanlon’s death. There is also a degree of provocation directed towards the police officer (Gary Lydon), who does not immediately recognise Kid as a dangerous fugitive. In contrast, Donnelly is shocked by the suicidal action, and is not surprised by the extent of the mother’s grief, whereas Kid wants him to “Admit it fella, she was getting on your nerves too with her bawling” (SS, 16:15). Kid’s acknowledgement of his mother’s murder is again expressed with a casual indifference, without disguising his antagonism for her. In the opening scene the doctor seems certain about the son’s part in slaying his mother. Like Billy Bickle in Seven Psychopaths, and Kid gets the shootout (stylised but in no way realistic) that he craves, but not the

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result he wants; Kid gets fatally wounded, but all police officers remain physically unharmed. The fact that Kid possesses a firearm and uses it are to be taken as indicators of his guilt. The Kid’s self-destructiveness, indeed, his desire to be caught by the police, his willingness to draw attention to himself and not to hide in plain sight seems to differentiate him from most renegade characters. Also he could have surrendered to the police and faced trial. As Caryn James affirms: “Deaths and accounts of deaths accumulate on the brief journey until the film seems to be set on some ‘Twilight Zone’ train of death” (2006). Kid’s anarchic, self-destructiveness needs to be placed alongside the blatant and false allegations made by him against the grieving couple. Kid’s accusations have no legal standing. In the courts the burden of proof relies not simply on impressions or instincts, but on established facts. False allegations are a terror and trauma in both interpersonal and legal realms. How an innocent couple is pursued by such a vengeful and destructive character, adds to their grief. The Kid punishes them psychologically for something they have not done and makes false allegations which the distressed couple feel duty bound to refute; emotionally that defence demands effort they cannot muster easily. If his instinct is to bring down anyone he can, that does not explain the fragments of compassion he offers Donnelly. Kid’s death-by-police-officer is not driven by the sense of guilt and remorse that Bruges’s Ray feels for his part in murders. In Shooter, guilt and innocence seem as clear-cut as they can ever be in McDonagh’s work. Kid may not have made a confession, but his actions in engaging the police, suggest his responsibility for the death of his mother. Dead or alive, Kid is unwanted.

The Lonesome West: Justice Perpetually and Eternally Deferred Parental figures are regularly not present in the family home, go unmentioned or are incidentally referenced in McDonagh’s work, with the exceptions of Mag in Beauty Queen, Donny in Inishmore, and in Spokane Carmichael has a strange, long-distance, by telephone relationship with his mother, Angela. Maureen kills her mother in Beauty Queen, as does Kid in Shooter, and in Pillowman Katurian kills both parents because they have tortured Michal. Lonesome was again first directed by Garry Hynes

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and opened in Galway on 10 June 1997 before transferring to London’s Royal Court. Its New York premiere came two years later. Lonesome opens in the aftermath of the funeral of Coleman and Valene Connor’s father, and the only reference to their mother is in relation to a figurine of the Pope gifted to her by Yanks. Ineffective, but not quite blatantly sinister, policing practices are again apparent in Lonesome, more in line with Inishmaan than Skull. Valene’s false witness statement shuts down an investigation into the fatal shooting of their father by Coleman, who explains the incident away as a frightful accident. However, this death is not as either brother describes, rather the inciting incident for the callous patricide is their father’s insulting of Coleman’s hairstyle. Coleman’s belief that he will not be brought before the courts can be seen as naïve, self-deceiving or his best estimate of the situation. The brothers share with the visiting Fr Welsh the lie that they have agreed upon, conditional on Coleman forfeiting his inheritance. Fr Welsh’s discussions around the confessional practices of his parishioners are much to the annoyance of the brothers, who seem or pretend to be perturbed by Fr Welsh’s breach of the confessional seal. Valene accuses Fr Welsh of failing his parishioners, in that there are two blatant murderers on the loose, Maureen Folan (Beauty Queen) and Mick Dowd (Skull), a tactic to steer accusations elsewhere. Welsh: What can I do, if the courts and the polis … Valene: Courts and the polis me arse. I heard the fella you represent was of a higher authority than the courts and the fecking polis. Welsh (sadly): I heard the same thing, sure. I must’ve heard wrong. It seems like God has no jurisdiction in this town. No jurisdiction at all. (LW, 134)

Fr Welsh wishes that his community is responsible enough to relay their knowledge of these incidents to the appropriate authorities. Small chance of that. In Maureen’s case, the spectator/reader, if familiar with Beauty Queen, grasps the inadequacy of the state investigation, but will have observed her criminal actions, and in Mick’s case, there is greater uncertainty as to his legal culpability. Indeed, it is Coleman that offers rival explanations as to the deaths of Mag and Oona, cleverly linking his innocence to theirs. Coleman was

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fortunate enough to have a witness that can corroborate his account, but neither Mick nor Maureen has that luxury. Fr Welsh accepts Coleman’s bona fides admission that he: “… Shot me dad’s head off him, point blank range” (LW, 136) and prompts Fr Welsh to query his own impulse to judge others; not to give his parishioners the benefit of the doubt or the presumption of innocence. Fr Welsh’s guilt at being the first one to peg metaphorically the first stone, triggers insight into his lack of compassion, but the religious tenets that Coleman incites Fr Welsh to reflect on, has no benign purpose. Fr Welsh’s attempts to align religiously-informed moral codes with criminal justice obligations are laudable, but it is a community not necessarily willing to follow suit. Coleman and Valene blur religious teachings with that which the film world provides, namely Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953), starring Montgomery Clift, where an unwillingness to break the confessional seal leads to Clift’s priest character being tried for a murder he did not commit. If Thomas lacks the basics of the law in Skull, Fr Welsh has not grasped the rudimentary tenets of Catholicism in Lonesome. Thomas’s sudden death by his own hand has been witnessed by a child, so we cannot assume it to be the case of a killer disguising his/her tracks. And Valene’s response to this suicide demonstrates how difficult it is for Valene to be empathetic towards the suffering of a neighbour. Valene does, however, attempt to feign empathy for Fr Welsh’s benefit; the fact that he tries to falsify that feeling demonstrates the gap between knowing a social obligation and being incapable of realising it with integrity. For comedic purpose, Valene’s empathy deficiencies coalesce with his obsessive, petulant, vindictive and calculating mindset. Yet again, what emerges from an accumulation of snippets of gossip, facts, lies, and speculations is that there is little benign about the interactions of the wider Leenane community, merely people holding grudges and possessing distasteful attitudes towards almost all and sundry. Valene’s collection of religious icons is precious to him, the holy saints are there to protect, but ultimately serve as empty moral markers. Valene’s narratives of right and wrong are partly religious in orientation, and equally, the popular cultural expressions of morality detected in the likes of Woman’s Way or Take a Break that offer world views that he can embrace or rile against, but either way they inform his consciousness. With these popular cultural evocations of duty, fairness and empathy, Valene is an astute, contrary, and against-the-grain reader, alert to attempts to engage him empathetically with the suffering of others.

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He assumes an image of a boy with no arms who has lost his mother in a warring Central Europe (Bosnia) has been cynically and dishonestly staged. The realisation that Coleman killed his father on purpose and that Valene had covered things up for his own benefit triggers Fr Welsh to plunge his hands into molten plastic, an outcome of Coleman placing Valene’s fibreglass figurines of saints in a hot oven. In the productions I have seen Fr Welsh’s traumatic consequence of so doing are not played to be taken as realistic, but as if a scenario from within the realm of farce, with inconsequential pain to the fore. While in pain, Fr Welsh maintains the presence of mind to correct his name, not “Walsh” but “Welsh” (LW, 159). Only the 17-year old Girleen (Mary Kelleher) offers any counterweight to the world view of the Connors brothers and Fr Welsh’s maudlin, un-grounded and disconcerting disposition. Girleen becomes deeply traumatised by Fr Welsh’s death by suicide, as she has been in love with him. This teenager is the most self-attuned of any of the characters, even if she responds to the violent wrestling of the two middle-aged bachelor brothers by taking a knife to Coleman’s neck in order to get him to stop fighting. Girleen also has a rich sense of self-aware humour, unlike the other characters. Even Girleen has internalised the code of omertà, admitting she had heard the rumour of the murder: Girleen: Sure I’m no focking stool-pigeon and Coleman’s dad was always a grumpy oul feck. He did kick my cat Eamon there once. Welsh: A fella deserves to die, so, for kicking a cat? Girleen (shrugs): It depends on the fella. And the cat. (LW, 162)

To Fr Welsh’s accusation of her lacking morality, she suggests that she has plenty of morals, but that she does not “keep whining on about them ….” (LW, 162). In a final-wishes letter to the brothers that captures his desperation, sincerity, and irony (surrounding his possible canonisation), Fr Welsh expresses his desire that the brothers mend their ways. Out of this forwardly-imagined miracle of reconciliation between both, Fr Welsh frames his suicide as a noble, mystical, and sacrificial act; he is betting his soul on their reconciliation. Twisted logic is to the fore in relation to matters of guilt, responsibility and accountability. According to prior conversations, suicides result in souls rotting in eternal damnation and are

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afforded no possibility of salvation. According to Fr Welsh, “… You can kill a dozen fellas, you can kill two dozen fellas. So long as you’re really sorry after you can still get into heaven. But if it’s yourself you go murdering, no. Straight to hell” (LW, 154). Fr Welsh does nothing with the information about Coleman’s patricide. Instead of drawing on the criminal justice system which Fr Welsh expects others to do, he evokes the mercy of God, and defies the moral tenets of his church by committing suicide. He does not want criminal justice, punishment or restitution, but instead he wants reconciliation and self-styled rehabilitation, upon which he bets his soul. It is the emphasis on spirit and belief rather than on criminal justice that needs ample signalling here, the essence of which is captured in the comments: “… But it is a matter for your own conscience, although I hope someday you will realise that what you have done and go seeking forgiveness for it …” (LW, 169) While what they have done to each other amount to “baby-crimes” (LW, 170) in Fr Welsh’s words, these may be a matter of conscience, but murder is hardly thus? Suicide becomes sacrifice, sacrifice becomes a spiritual gamble, an act of faith, and forgiveness becomes justice according to his fatalistic logic. (As she has read the letter, Girleen has full knowledge of its revelations.) Having shaken hands and having shared food after Fr Welsh’s funeral service, the brothers kickstart the reconciliation process. Tensions rise, but they are dampened by the notion of establishing some distance, the “stepping back” that Fr Welsh’s letter prompts (LW, 183). In the name of open disclosure, both brothers offload a litany of transgressions, including bullying, the disappearance of toys, physical harm, and the causing of infection to the cruel actions that lead to a relationship break up (Coleman’s with Alison O’Hoolihan) and, crucially, the slaying of Valene’s beloved pet dog, Lassie, for which Mairtin Hanlon was long held as the chief suspect, having allegedly confessed to Blind Billy Pender. Coleman’s next remark captures a degree of knowing suitability: “That’s only hearsay evidence. You wouldn’t get that evidence to stand up in a court of law. Not from a blind boy anyways” (LW, 132). Billy’s revenge for what Mairtin does to him in Skull, that is, forces him into a false confession. Although Coleman has pleaded guilty to the criminal offence of killing the dog, Valene’s comment that the game only works if what is said is based on truth. Coleman leaves the room to retrieve the evidence, enraging Valene by placing the dog’s ears on his head. Coleman’s offer of a felt-tipped pen so that Valene can engrave his initials on the ears, results in violent mayhem. The chaos on stage leads to a standoff, then

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stalemate, and to another provisional backing down by both. Coleman claims he is “truly” sorry, for the killing the dog, murdering his father, and destructing the figurines (LW, 194). The play’s farcical dramaturgy and the humour that may arise from such a transgressive reality when the brothers decide to confess and to absolve each other, gives rise to a form of abject laughter, which I will unpack later in Chapter 5. Coleman’s delight in the affirmation of such wrongdoings are glee driven, and Valene’s assertion that it is a game and that he is willing enough to signal both insincerity and an inability to stay on track. The rivalries between the brothers have archetypal reverberations and are grounded somewhat in the conflicts of fairy tales (or over-read as tribal/sectarian tensions), where there is an unwillingness to negotiate anything like win-win outcomes. The lose-lose scenario that the brothers are inclined towards suggests a mutuality of suspicion and discontent, a template of abject relations. Farce’s generic excesses and indulgences contort if not discount the cross-relating of the work back towards the real. Indeed, in classic farce, as Jessica Milner Davis argues, although “violence is omnipresent,” it is “often more sound and fury than actual harm, more symbolic gesture than potent action” (3). Such characters tend to be high/mean spirited, doomed to repeat, innately compulsive, and lacking in self-reflection (Milner Davis, 2–5). Genre complicates notions of guilt and accountability, especially if laughter is to the fore. It is only later with Inishmore, where the violence that farce revels in, but also contains, gets unleashed into an orgy of violence. That is not to say that the violence in Lonesome is simply faux or playful violence, it is sinister and intense. As Ben Brantley notes in his review of Hynes’s New York production, these “two middle-aged brothers whacked away at each other like a liquored-up Punch and Judy” (1999). The confessional mode adopted or improvised by the brothers, rather than having been informed by or based on the sanctity of a penitential sacrament, where contrite admissions of guilt lead to absolution and penance, instead it becomes a game of one-upmanship. Their revelation carries little by way of intended compensation or a willingness to make things right, but much by way of the pulling rank and taking perverse joy in troubling disclosures. However, what is most important is the fact that both the illegal and the immoral are co-joined, made indistinguishable.

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Coleman: … That’s the good thing about being Catholic. You can shoot your dad in the head and it doesn’t even matter at all. Valene: Well it matters a little bit. (LW, 182)

Positioning patricide within a confessional/religious realm is an astute one, because in that civic space, admission of responsibility and personal apology would be an utterly inappropriate outcome for such a crime. Neither God nor justice has jurisdiction. Indeed, a form of abject/ insidious corruption is evident in their fixating on the religious realm, because of the anomalous opportunities on offer, namely, all transgressions interpersonal and personal, apart from suicide, only require repentance, penance and absolution. In giving credence to a Catholic God that allows the slate to be wiped clean, there are penitential but no civil consequences, nothing of the consequential justice that Sen advocates. Fr Welsh proposes not incapacitation, retribution or rehabilitation, but expiation in the form of personal confession as a quasi-sacramental act. (See Hanly’s outline of the four objectives of punishment, “incapacitation, retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation” [20].) While confession offers a form of divine mercy in many ways, and while mercy more generally cannot be divorced from justice, divine mercy can never be a justice substitute. Religious doctrine provides an anomalous get out of jail card. Accordingly, justice is not simply arbitrary, avoidable, corrupted or postponed, but is mangled and transformed into something else by means of religion, to function in an alternative or parallel dimension, beyond the remit and reach of the courts. Catholic doctrine does not explicitly preach that viewpoint, but with the Church scandals around clerical sexual abuse, the evidence suggests otherwise, as mentioned earlier in Chapter 2. The Church too often took recourse in Cannon Law to avoid the civic responsibility to name the alleged perpetrators of crimes it was aware of, as it licensed and oversaw the inadequate protection of children, teenagers and vulnerable adults, effectively systematically facilitating abuses in many instances. Indirectly, in the praise Coleman offers Fr Welsh for not going around abusing children, unlike many of his peers, McDonagh is placing the spotlight not just on religious cover-ups, but also on the intimidation and silencing of victims. Too many priests were allowed to use the sacrament of penance as a remedial and self-serving avenue to avoid proper punishment for crimes committed. The brother’s illogicality, and the irrationality of Fr Welsh all

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crudely mesh around the inadequacy and insufficiency of justice on the one hand, and, on the other, the insidious evasion of punishment. Justice is not performed or seen to be performed in public, rather it is detoured into the privacy of the confessional space, to evade the reach of justice. The corrupt preserve themselves from justice by whatever means. From the tit-for-tat, slapstick justice framework that the brothers are inclined to substantiate, and by their moving towards a penitent framework in lieu of justice, Lonesome presents a viewpoint where criminal justice is neither a requirement nor an inevitability. The horror of such a perspective is a harrowing one, the disavowal of all higher and appropriate authority to whom one might be answerable.

In Bruges: Consequential and Unconditional Justice and Its Peculiar Enactments Since its release in 2008 In Bruges has served as the first introduction for many to McDonagh’s work. The film’s writing, score, cinematography, editing, and acting have been variously recognised by critics, and in the garnering of nominations and awards. The Belgian city of Bruges serves as the hideout location suggested by English crime boss, Harry Walters (Ralph Fiennes) for two London-based hitmen of Irish origin, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), after Ray’s assassination of the intended target, Fr McHenry (Ciarán Hinds), incurs an additional casualty. A young boy (Theo Stevenson) becomes the victim of a stray bullet. The boy was in the church waiting to make a simple confession. Ray’s entry into the confessional box was not for the sacrament of penance but to extinguish a life and speaks indirectly to the centrality of confession to Lonesome. Ken and Ray believe that they are simply lying low and evading the reach of the law enforcement officers, perhaps waiting to hear about their next job, while Harry’s idea is that Ray should be shown a delightful time in Bruges, given death-row-like comforts, before his execution. If Harry had killed a child, he is of the conviction that he would immediately and without hesitation take his own life. As Ray did not react in the same way, Ken is to be tasked with the killing of his protégé. Ray’s evolving guilt and despair take him into a suicidially-inclined, dark place that is an irrelevance to Harry.

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Although set in the contemporary world, the screenplay claims that “We could be in any period of the last 500 years. We happen to be in the present day” (IB, 3). Bruges is a city with numerous canals, cobble-stoned streets, bell towers, museums, quaint parks and imposing, gothic churches, and these physical structures and spaces combine with fogs and mists to shape the film’s atmosphere. Geoff King notes of Eigil Bryld’s cinematography that the lighting “generates a soft golden glowing effect, combined in chiaroscuro style with patches of deep shadow, further establishing the overall ‘quality’ impression of the visuals” (135). In his review, Cosmo Landesman notes: “Instead of the urban jungle of anonymous modern cities, here we have two killers trapped in the chocolate-box beauty of a medieval town” (2008). (Catherine O’Brien’s analysis reflects on the significance of the pervasive Christian iconography and architecture [1–13].) Carter Burrell’s score, production design by Michael Carlin, Jon Gregory’s editing, and Bryld’s cinematography create a specific gothic-inspired, dream-like “other worldly” atmosphere—with a sense of disorientated elsewhere. Additionally, the film production taking place in the vicinity also adds to the film’s overall mysterious feel. Additionally, FitzPatrick Dean notes that Carlin’s production design “fills the filmwithin-the film’s misty, hallucinatory set with enormous animals, menacing nuns, disconcerting doubles, masked figures, and, yes, dwarves” (2009, 167). There is a sense of almost fairy tale timelessness, and its near-Christmastime setting further enhances the sense of the festive and the seasonally transformative. The various spaces and places in Bruges conspire to create a unique backdrop to a film where issues of morality, empathy, socio-pathology and guilt are to the fore, in ways that foreground issues of justice and retributive punishment on the one hand, and, on the other, absolution, redemption and second chances that a religious and non-religious perspective seem to offer. Farrell’s initial (confessional) voice-over establishes one kind of mood, initially with his gloomy and factual account of the contract killing, him washing up afterwards in a Burger King and disposing of the gun in the Thames river. The bickering between Ken and Ray about how to spend their time creates an alternative mood-set, the diametrically opposed, culture versus fun as they present it. Culture wins out, given Ken’s stronger hand.

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Increasingly overwhelmed by remorse, Ray is no pathological killer, indifferent to the suffering he caused, and spews out his sense of responsibility and guilt from the off, unlike Kid, Coleman or Valene. While visiting the Groeninge Museum, Ray has an unsettling encounter with Jan Provoost’s “De gierigaard en de Dood” (The Miser and Death) (IB, 24:27). This canvas imagines a final judgement set in a confessional box or as the screenplay describes it “a skeletal death comes to collect his due” (IB, 24). The museum’s gruesome diptych “Judgement of Cambyses” and “The Flaying of the Corrupt Judge Sisamnes” by Gerard David, further unnerves Ray. Public figures must be fair-minded in their legal decisions; corruption is not tolerated, accordingly flaying is the punishment for Sisamnes’s illicit judgements. Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Last Judgement” is admired by Ray; in this work judgement day is about the affirmation of salvation or damnation, with heaven and hell the ultimate sanctions/rewards. Lapsed Catholics or otherwise, the religious iconography resonates with how both Ken and Ray were reared, and accordingly obliges Ray to further process his guilt. (Dargis [2008], Rouse [2011] and Melnikova [2013] all capture in detail the encounters between characters and paintings, and what is inflicted by these religious perspectives.) If Catholicism offers the possibility of absolution, penance and salvation, and if celestial authority is the direction in which Fr Welsh steers the Connor brothers rather than towards civic authority, in Bruges Harry has nothing like this in mind. Bruges is a fairy tale consolation, prior to Ray’s final judgement before the court of this criminal overlord. When Ken is about to approach Ray and assassinate him, reflex trumps intent as Ken screams to stop Ray from killing himself. The script describes it as an “almost involuntarily” scream (IB, 53). Ken choses to protect Ray over his obligations towards Harry. Potential perpetrator becomes rescuer and hero for the guilty villain, who has been close to being either a victim of Ken or victim of himself. Villainy, victimhood, perpetrator, and rescuer are all complicated and interdigitated by this crucial moment. If Ken was reluctantly committed to do Harry’s bidding, his witnessing of Ray’s attempted suicide prompts a call on an alternative system of justice, one partly inspired by miracle, the occasional transformation of the vial of blood held the Basilica of the Holy Blood (not the church used for filming), by his Catholicism, by his lived experiences and self-reflection on his own genuinely good and evil deeds. In this instance, Ken’s “save the next little boy” code wins out over Harry’s retributive

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model, based on matters “of honour” and principles of account that need to be persisted with (IB, 60:05). In the courts, second chances or leniency are reserved for relatively minor misdemeanours, in situations of diminished responsible, or for people unlikely to commit an offence again, a double murder committed by a contract killer would be met by few accommodations—there is no room for perpetrator impact statements, which this film is, in some respects. As to why Harry sanctions the hit on a priest, the film does not make apparent, even if a DVD Extra (deleted scene) does; the priest was serving on an action committee opposing Harry’s property development, whereas Ray incorrectly assumes Harry has targeted the priest because of sexual abuse. Ruthlessness is Harry’s default mode, witnessed when he is enraged by Ken as they talk over the phone and in the way that he turns on his wife Natalie (Elizabeth Berrington), while their children watch her from a distance. Harry’s realisation that Ken did not see through on his code of honour obliges him to set out for Bruges to punish Ken for his disloyalty. While in Bruges, Ray also finds love of sorts. If this romantic dimension makes him more relatable, it also gives further insight into his irrational views on justice and restitution. A date with Chloë puts Ray into another situation of conflict with two Canadians, whom he believes to be American. The man (Željko Ivanek) takes offence because Chloë is smoking, Ray assaults him and when the woman (Stephanie Carey) comes at him with a bottle, Ray strikes her, seeing his action as carried out in self-defence. Yet, in striking both Canadians, Ray makes redundant claims about offering some form of reparative justice for the Vietnamese in light of the Vietnam War, and retribution for the killing of John Lennon on American soil. (The scene echoes how Ken is haunted by his killing of Danny Aliband’s brother, who came at Ken, bottle in hand.) Ray’s sense of accountability is askew, such feckless and invalid claims on retributive justice inform the wider network of justice deliberations. Confusing nationalities is but one part of that abjective strategy that McDonagh prefers. Chloë and Eirik (Jérémie Rénier) deal drugs to film crews and her teasing him about being once friendly with a victim of a Belgian child killer unnerves Ray. Eirik’s attempt to rob Ray while he is in bed with Chloë, as part of their ongoing scamming of tourists is also important, even in a city that looks cute and medieval, it still has its criminality, drugs providers, prostitution, gun dealing.

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Ken’s confrontation/surrender to Harry in the bell tower shows him bending to Harry’s form of underworld justice, acknowledging the price he has to pay for letting Ray free and for breaching Harry’s norms. A bullet wound to the thigh is the relatively minor punishment Ken receives for not following through on the direct order, but the tensions between both escalate when Eirik announces that Ray still remains in the city. With the stakes changing, Harry overpowers Ken and fatally shoots him in the neck. Harry’s pursuit and eventual wounding of Ray results in Jimmy (Jordan Prentice) getting shot: the small-in-stature actor is dressed in a child’s school uniform for a film role that imitates the nightmare world of Bosch. Harry assumes that Jimmy is a child, and a wounded Ray tries to clarify that Jimmy is not a child, by way of stopping Harry from killing himself. Harry persists: “You’ve got to stick to your principles” (IB, 97:42). Principles around killing, do not give his corrupt criminal world any coherence or moral standing, simply it is shown to be the convenient embellishment that it is. Critically, if not fatally wounded, Ray’s mind focuses on the child he killed, the Christmas presents that will remain unopened, and considers visiting the mother of the dead child and accepting whatever punishment she decrees. From this perspective, justice is not that of the British police or Europol that have failed to track him down, not that of Harry’s, not that of the Church’s, but the individual justice of the person on whom the crime has had most lasting impact. It is as if this somehow seems to be Ray’s expression of definitive justice, a punishment not only befitting of the crime committed, but something well beyond that, within the realm of unconditional surrender. Ray’s next thought however, “Prison, death, it didn’t matter. Cos at least in prison, and at least in death, y’know, I wouldn’t be in fucking Bruges” (IB, 98:30) serves as an ironic mode-matching initiative, contesting but not supplanting the profound sentiment of absolute justice, previously expressed with such conviction. How often do you get a mainstream film, whose central character is a priest and a child killer, to whom audiences are empathetically drawn? Regardless, Ken’s hope for a second chance for Ray, carries with it the reality that genre practices will not allow Ray to go unpunished. With Ray’s near death, McDonagh does go far to fulfil genre obligations, as he does with Beauty Queen’s Maureen. The affection and erotic connection shared by Ray and Chloë is one of the charming aspects of the film,

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and the fact that the relationship is never consummated functions as an additional genre punishment for him.

The Pillowman: Coerced Truths, Diminished Capacity and Myths of Justice Substitutes McDonagh’s fixations on interrogations, false, devious, and coerced confessions, untruthful alibis and miscarriages of justice are as evident in 2015’s Hangmen as they are in Pillowman from 2003. Pillowman premiered at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe auditorium in London on 13 November 2003 and since then the play has also had numerous notable productions around the world. Without a specific location or precise time frame, an interrogation cell in the notional Kamenice, in an unnamed totalitarian state, serves as Pillowman’s primary location, where a writer, Katurian, is interrogated by detectives Tupolski and Ariel. (See Pilný [2006] and Worthen and Worthen [2006] for their various views on the time/space interfaces.) Totalitarianism is often regarded as either single-personed dictatorship or a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as Karl Dietrich Bracher describes it (16–17). Sen’s work is particularly hostile towards authoritarian states that transgress the ideas of justice, because of single leadership or power condensed amongst a few, the absence of political opposition, censorship, no free press or poor information flow, and flawed institutions, including judicial practices, which function without being answerable to a collective citizenship (342–349). Ideological violence is one of Steven Pinker’s five categories of violence, the others are predatory, domineering, revenge-driven, and sadistic violence (xxiiiv). For Pinker, totalitarian ideological violence is where “The really big body count in history piles up with a large number of people carrying out a motive that transcends any one of them: an […] ideological violence is a means to an end. But with any ideology, the end is idealistic: a conception of the greater good” (671). A “greater good” emphasis results in “means-ends reasoning, which encourages us to carry out unpleasant means as a way to bring about desirable ends” (Pinker, 671). Totalitarianism also pitches one world view in sharp contrast to another, and opponents are not part of some dialectical debate, but a force to be aggressively opposed if not eradicated. For Pinker, totalitarianism operates not as much at the level of the psychological, more

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on the “epidemiological,” accordingly “toxic ideology can spread from a small number of narcissistic zealots to an entire population willing to carry out its designs” (672). “Group think”, polarisation, the moralisation of “conformity and obedience,” “the taking cues from others, allowing one’s better judgement to be over-ridden by mutual consensus and collective delusions, pluralistic ignorance or the spiral of silence, when people think everyone else believes the opposite,” all of these are part of the complex totalitarian socio-political dynamic that Pinker identifies (673–678). Under such regimes, expectations surrounding law and justice might include a lack of due process, a degree of paranoia, and the easy erasure of legal rights once someone is under investigation. Law enforcement is likely to be rigorously partial and inhumane. Slavoj Žižek notes that one of the strategies of totalitarian regimes is to have legal regulation (criminal laws) so severe that, if taken literally, everyone is guilty of something. But then their full enforcement is withdrawn. In this way, the regime can appear merciful: “You see, if we wanted, we could have all of you arrested and condemned, but do not be afraid, we are lenient [….] At the same time, the regime wields the permanent threat of disciplining its subjects” (135). Thus for Žižek, “Here we have an overlap of potential total culpability (whatever you are doing may be a crime) and of mercy (the fact that you are allowed to lead your life in peace is not a proof or consequence of your innocence, but a proof of the mercy and benevolence of an understanding of the realities of life, of those in power” (135). Pillowman bears little or no relation to people’s individual and collective experiences of totalitarian rule, which obviously varies by time, place and regime. Instead what the play offers is the artistic distillation of some but not all of the key complicators surrounding freedom, rights, mercy and justice of totalitarian rule more broadly. (See Péter P. Müller [2009] on his experiences of totalitarian role and his reading of the play in light of that 47–64.) In terms of McDonagh’s dramatization of totalitarianism, what we can pick out from the play would include, subjugation, surveillance, the low regard for personal rights, a refusal to accommodate protest or dissent, the use of ruthless physical and psychological power and the means by which a state variously discourages or erases the importance of individuality, while foregrounding its role in concentrating the essence of its citizens’ collective dreams. However, simplistic binary distinctions between victim/perpetrator, innocence/perpetual guilt,

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self-defence/self-preservation, and prosecution/mercy do not hold, particularly when rival systems of justice are circulated within the play. As the play opens, an initially blindfolded Katurian is manipulated, intimidated and threatened by Tupolski and Ariel, and one may initially suspect it is a situation where the writer is anti-state, possibly revolutionary or at least dissident, ultimately someone on the side of greater freedoms and human rights. The writer as seditious protester, political advocate/subversive or unnerving threat to state security is traditionally one of the key tropes found in writing about totalitarian or futuristic police/military dictator states. Katurian proves to be no such radical agitator; although passive aggressive, he seemingly has no truck with the state’s activities or with its agents’ interrogation of him or of his stories. Indeed, an overly compliant Katurian offers to edit out anything that may be interpreted as wayward, unsavoury or subversive in his writing; for someone who believes so much in the merits of his work, this seems like alarming acquiescence. If Katurian has a dark secret, he is unaware of a darker reality about to engulf him. The police are under pressure to solve a series of child murders: Andrea Jovacovic’s body has been discovered on a heath, with blades forced down her mouth. Aaron Goldberg’s remains were dumped behind the Jewish quarter with his toes amputated. A mute girl, Maria, is now missing. Tupolksi appears to be the more assured and measured, Ariel is the aggressive, hot-headed detective, strangely obsessed with child protection, not content to be Tupolski’s junior. Tupolski and Ariel physically abuse their detainee, behaviours contrary to current standard interrogation practices in most democratic states. One does not have to go too far into the past to find abundant evidence of violatory interrogating tactics, both nationally and internationally for most spectators. The “War on Terror” in the early 2000s, with its black-site detention and interrogation centres, and torture in the forms of waterboarding, restraining, sleep deprivation and such-like suggest that the state legitimisation of torture is never beyond the reach of “civilised” administrations. Civil rights erode all too quickly in conflict situations (See Jordan 2006, 174–197). World histories all too frequently document the torturing of individuals as a mode of confessional inducement, and the reliability/ veracity of such extracted statements remains disputed. Communities, families, tribal societies, religious groupings, educators, jailors, armies, paramilitaries and gangsters have been variously engaged in such practices,

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as both Hangmen’s vigilante interrogators and Inishmore’s kangaroo court practitioners amply demonstrate. Katurian initially wants to steer the encounter as if the interrogation of his writing is merely evidence of a suspicious state querying his ideological leanings, and he even tries to position his interrogators as quasi-literary critics, close readers of his work for its hidden and dissenting meanings. However, the revelation that his brother Michal is also being interrogated, and that evidence has been discovered in his family home which is pertinent to the ongoing murder investigations raise the dramatic stakes. Two of Katurian’s stories have seemingly served as templates for the recent child murders. If we take the investigative premise that there is no such thing as coincidence, then the spectator is invited to speculate how this dramatic situation might unfold. Katurian overhears Michal screaming in the distance, and he assumes that his brother is undergoing torture. This is not the first time that he has witnessed the infliction of pain on his brother, as his parents had experimented with their two offspring: one (Katurian) was showered with love, kindness and attention, and the other (Michal), was the victim of brutal torture, with the intention that the former’s creative writing would be inspired by the proximity of the traumatised, mutilated, and abjected other. Of the 400 or so stories that Katurian has written, few could be regarded as being optimistic in viewpoint (P, 100). Part fairy tales, part surrealist dystopian fantasies, these works offer a world where children are variously violated at the hands of ruthless adults, guardians and parents, from “The Little Apple Men” story to “The Town by the River”, from “The Writer and the Writer’s Brother” to “The Little Jesus Story”, some of which are paraphrased in performance, some narrated, some narrated while being re-enacted. Bruno Bettelheim’s work on fairy tales suggests that fairy tales give great access to unconscious forces, the multiple and contradictory drives that a child possesses. Fairy tales help children to clarify their life objectives, and tend to be less about morality, right and wrong, and more about the side with which the child chooses most to align—the downtrodden, the victim, the vulnerable and brave—and which characters he/ she believes has the best shot at success (Bettelheim, 3–6). In fairy tales, Bettelheim argues, “evil is as omnipresent as virtue,” but that polarisation is essential, even if we all know that our minds are not so clearly demarcated (8).

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Bettelheim adds that in fairy tales, “as in life, punishment or fear of it, is only a limited deterrent to crime. The conviction that crime does not pay is a much more effective deterrent, and that is why in fairy tales the bad character always loses out. It is not the fact that virtue wins out at the end which promotes morality, but that the hero is most attractive to the child, who identifies with the hero in all his (sic) struggles” (9). Bettelheim claims it is the “assurance that one can succeed” that is so important to fairy tales (10). Accordingly, the central existential problem for Bettelheim is “Whether one meets life with a belief in the possibility of mastering its difficulties or with the expectation of defeat” (10). Although fairy tales rely on clear dichotomies between antagonist and protagonist, and offer positive outcomes for the brave, good and nonrisk-adverse characters, Katurian’s stories are more complex than that, and fail to be so easily situated. The little apple girl character who bravely topples her beastly, gluttonous and abusive father, and who thinks her suffering will end with his demise, goes on to be punished for her actions by little apple men figures, who have lost comrades in the realisation of her revenge plan. A schematic justice that results in paternal “comeuppance” begets an unforeseen tit-for-tat retaliatory violence, breaching fairy tale norms in terms of closure and victory (P, 13). Reprisal is an unintended or unanticipated consequence of her actions, even if just. The little boy who kindly shares his meagre rations with a stranger in “The Town by the River” ends up losing his toes at the hands of said stranger. The payoff relies on knowledge of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” in which the little cripple boy who is not swift enough of foot to be enticed away by the piper, becomes the town’s one surviving child, after the others are lured away due to non-payment of a debt. Then there is the play’s dominant and intricately networked story of “The Pillowman,” where the suicide-assisting, mercy killing prompting, time-travelling Pillowman-figure can no longer do his draining and depressing job. He assists children, if they so choose, in the taking of their own lives, momentarily before the start of chaotic suffering that is to become their life’s destiny, a trauma that will inevitably lead to suicide years later. “The Little Jesus” story and “The Writer and the Writer’s Brother” are enacted through the use of surrealistic costuming and grotesque characterisations, alongside heightened lighting and sound effects in the productions of the play that I have seen. The girl’s messiah complex in the former leads to whipping, leg breaking, crucifixion, and being buried

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alive. She can follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, but she is ironically denied resurrection. In the play’s premier at the National Theatre, directed by John Crowley and designed by Scott Pask, when the girl is tortured by the foster parents there were beating gestures, the young actor’s head moved from side to side to indicate a response to the blows, but she did so without registering any sound or degree of pain, so the blows were outrageously and purposefully contrived. Accordingly, narratives such as the above move the play well away from the terrain of basic verisimilitude by Grand-Guignol, carnivalesque and cartoon-like performance modes. If the “Writer and the Writer’s Brother” partially documents/fictionalises the way that Katurian and Michal were reared, the fact that cannot be evaded is that Katurian’s gruesome narratives provide the templates for the real-life murders; Michal admits to force-feeding the young girl apples with hidden razor blades inside, and the chopping off the toes of a young boy. In terms of justice, Michal eventually discloses to Katurian that he has carried out these murders, but Michal exists in a world without access to full functioning rationality, brain damage brought about by torture has left him incapable of clearly differentiating between fact and fiction. As signalled in Chapter 1, legal doctrine establishes culpability based on a model of Actus reus/Mens rea, guilty act/guilty mind. Michal is not fully aware of his thoughts or actions. If the state wants to present itself outwardly as all seeing and all knowing, evident in the narrative perspective in Tupolski’s story, “The Story of the Little Deaf Boy on the Big Long Railroad Tracks. In China”, but when it comes to the Katurian family’s domestic circumstances, the state does not seek to intervene in the actions of Michal’s parents. Michal’s admission of guilt does not leave the brothers with much room to manoeuvre. Expectations audiences might have about detainee rights and due process that they have from personal knowledge or from television or film, are not likely to be met. Neither brother gains access to legal counsel, nor will they face a judge or jury, or have recourse to appeal courts. Katurian makes a written confession to the killing of his parents, to the mercy killing of Michal, and to his part in the killing of three children, Aaron, Andrea and Maria, in order to strike a deal so that his stories might survive, a deal based on full disclosure.

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The details Katurian provides about the killing of the missing Maria are reliant on information provided by Michal. When asked, Katurian is incapable of describing the murdered Jewish boy. Katurian had no hand, act or part to play in the harming of any of the children, so fundamentally, his is a false and forced confession, motivated by the certainty of his own demise and by his need to salvage something from the situation. Confessional anomalies give rise to no reconsideration of the facts, merely frustrations around the additional paperwork required. Normally, pleas of self-defence are connected to issues of imminence, retreat and the use of appropriate force. In domestic situations, loss of control does not have to be immediate but the effects of “cumulative provocation” (Read and Fitzpatrick, 333). This is often based on legal precedents that cover battered spouses (and offspring). Given what had been done to Michal, Katurian’s slaying of his parents could be seen as having strong mitigating circumstances, at worst, leniency might be the outcome under many legal regimes, and at best, Katurian’s action could be viewed as a form of self-defence, self-preservation or self-protection, and the effects of regular provocation and cumulative abuses, where reasonable and proportionate retaliation/responses are deemed merited and just. Ariel’s changing of his mind and keeping Katurian’s stories safe, sealing them with his case file, is a benign action of sorts. However, a legacy promise is no substitute for justice. Katurian’s summary execution is trumped, dramatically at least, by his redemptive and upbeat story from beyond the grave. Might there be more at play here than a world free-floating (outside time and space) theatrical world in some vaguely familiar totalitarian realm? The lack of specificity licenses speculation. Mark Ravenhill argues that his generation found their dramaturgical template/gestus a decade earlier in the killing of Jamie Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables in February 1993 (310). It is easy to see why such a horrific violation would shape the dramaturgy of a generation, as the incident exposed the randomness of the action by these child killers, but it was an incident where language, logic, reason and understanding fails, something that happens that is beyond evil and beyond innocence. (The killing took place along railway tracks, which feature in Tupolski’s story and Carmichael’s victim narrative in Spokane.)

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McDonagh has also written about the killings of two boys in the Warrington bombings by the Provisional IRA also in 1993 as being a major influence on Inishmore, and there will be more on that later. Beneath all the complex layers of Pillowman’s totalitarian sensibility, there is the operating realities of democracies more generally, so inequalities and justice deficits of democratic societies are subtextually apparent. However, it does not take much to link the interrogations by police officers in an unnamed totalitarian state in Pillowman to an Irish diasporic consciousness and to the idea of miscarriages of justice, uneasy with and distrusting of the approaches and procedures of interrogating police officers in the 1970–1980s, in particular. After all, McDonagh’s formative years were during the start of the Provisional IRA’s paramilitary campaign in Britain, their response to the violent actions by the British State and loyalist gangs, in the period known as the Northern Irish “Troubles” (1968–1998). The Prevention of Terrorism Act came into force on 29 November 1974, after bombs exploded in two Birmingham pubs, the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town, on 21 November, which left twenty-one people dead and 182 people injured. This Act gave the police liberties that many saw as draconian, and effectively licensed those in authority to take what most now regard as discriminatory attitudes and actions towards some Irish citizens or second-generation Irish living in Britain, some whom were detained, interrogated, charged, prosecuted and correctly convicted, but sometimes wrongly incarcerated. In Beauty Queen Ray tarnishes the reputation of the Irish police by association when he proposes that they are no different to their English counterparts, particularly those who assaulted those in custody and colluded in denying the Birmingham Six their rights. Many of those arrested, detained and interrogated about the Birmingham (and Guildford) bombings faced not only sleep deprivation, suffered severe beatings, were threatened by aggressive dogs, experienced threats of murder to themselves, family and friends. In terms of the Birmingham Six, Hugh Callaghan, Paddy Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker were wrongly convicted in 1975 but only released in 1991 after their convictions were eventually overturned in the Court of Appeal (Moriarty 2016). In the instances of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, the CAIN Web Services notes:

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On 22 October 1975 Patrick Armstrong, Gerard Conlon, Paul Hill and Carole Richardson … were found guilty at the Old Bailey of causing explosions in London in October 1974. The four were sentenced to life imprisonment. Following an appeal the four were released on 19 October 1989. The court of appeal decided that the ‘confessions’ had been fabricated by the police. In a linked case, members of the Maguire family, the ‘Maguire Seven’, were convicted on 3 March 1976 of possession of explosives (even though no explosives were found) and some served 10 years in prison before the convictions were overturned. (CAIN Web Services)

Whether it was the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, or the Maguire Seven, not all witness statements were provided to defence counsels by prosecutors, and information contrary to the prosecution’s case was wilfully repressed. Indeed, the “Appalling Vista” comment expressed by Lord Denning in response to a civil case taken by the Birmingham Six in 1980, touches on the disbelief and consequential horror at the likelihood of the existence of systemic corruption that operated during these fraught times by the Crown Prosecution Service and West Midlands Police, for which there has never been adequate investigation or prosecution. Denning withdrew his viewpoint after the Appeal Court verdict (Purcell 1999). Many Irish suffered as a consequence of these bombs; some felt shame and disgust, and expressed the notion that these actions were not carried out in their name, but they were often discriminated against, lost jobs, shunned at work, got beaten by neighbours and colleagues. It is little wonder that these particular miscarriages of justice and the tensions of these times were central to an Irish diasporic consciousness, then, long afterwards, and to McDonagh’s dramaturgy more generally. In Pillowman it is important to note that neither police officer is troubled dilemma-wise by impartiality, lack of objectivity, due process, the right to a defence. There is no anxiety shown by either Ariel or Tupolski that they might be found later to have overstepped the mark during interrogation or face charges for their execution of Katurian. It is this carefree attitude alongside the almost everyday blandness of their actions that ensure that justice is found wanting. However, given the absence of state justice in Pillowman, the drama relies on the interfacing of complex and rival systems of justice in order to make a more complex statement about justice itself. A “comeuppance” outcome is consistent with most fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm more traditional-orientated stories, but less so from

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the work of Hans Christian Andersen, who appears in Dark Matter. In what looks like the more politicised stories, Katurian disputes the notion that his work is based on the adult/state getting its eventual “comeuppance.” Katurian’s stories seem to follow through on a victim/revenge model, with a twist, while others emphasise the randomness of the victim/reward and violator/punishment tropes. If courage and virtue are not necessarily rewarded and unfairness or cruelty are not inevitably punished, and if heroes or anti-heroes do not succeed with consistency or serve as role models but sometimes give up and quit, like the Pillowman does, what are the consequences of this collapse of the polarisation so central to Bettelheim’s analysis? Additionally, there is no rescuer in “The Little Jesus” story as there is in “The Writer and the Writer’s Brother”, and generally there are no clear-cut happy ever after endings, apart from the one beyond the grave which ends Pillowman, and even then sacrifice and love are the outcomes of pain, not pleasure or joy. Successful outcomes in fairy tales are almost always framed as issues of justice and failures as a matter of injustice. In Katurian’s writings, justice is seldom done or seen to be done, either decisively or conclusively. For Michal, Katurian is his rescuer and hero, and he idolises him, but when Michal turns towards Katurian’s stories it is not for templates of success, but as inspiration for murder, fact and fiction meet head on. Michal imagines himself as a heroic Pillowman figure, distorting the empathetic sensibility of the story. The violated bodies of the children in Katurian’s tales cannot remain separated from what has happened in the real. The polarisation imperative of fairy tales is not grasped by Michal, who admits that he cannot do opposites very well, so fiction and reality converge. Katurian’s down-beat endings offer neither a happy-ever-after closure, nor a celebration of “comeuppance”. Conversely in the lived world, Michal wants to frame unfairly his victims as somewhat deserving, and the cruel parents do get their “comeuppance” so to speak, and there is nothing downbeat about that. “The Tale of the Town on the River” complicates the notion of reward not so much by saying we cannot determine evil/good so easily, more that evil deeds can result in positive outcomes, when intentionality is unpacked. Time provides the ability to differentiate, the trauma and consequences of the chopping off the toes versus the disappearing of a community of children bares no comparison. And the riddle of the “Three Gibbet Crossroads” leaves the abhorrent

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criminal, abandoned, murdered in cold blood, but uncertain as to the charges to which he has been found guilty, left unaware of his crime, and with no understanding of that for which he is punished. Of course, Ariel smothers his abusive father with a pillow, just as Katurian had done to his mother and father. The taking of the law into his own hands has not stopped Ariel’s career progression, but Katurian’s killing of his parents to protect his brother is not similarly regarded. Ariel assumes himself to be in the vanguard of his own reductive form of justice, someone whose guiding principle is always to have “the child’s side” in mind, a variation on ‘comeuppance’ (P, 78). While Ariel may occasionally get it wrong, it is a cost worth bearing. The innocent will not dare offend after he has had his way with them. His ultimate/eternal reward will be children coming up to him and giving sweets to an identifiable local hero, who has made the world a safer place. Ariel believes in this happy ever after type ending, but his methods do not chime with broader and more complex forms of justice. Additionally, the Pillowman figure appears when there is nobody to take the child’s side and ensure its safety and protection. The child is abandoned, standing alone to face adult terror. A child’s pain serves as a measure of trauma, negligence and injustice, about which there can be no moral relativism or irony. In Katurian’s final story, pain is deemed by Michal as a gift to accept, and it is creativity and altruism and not the cruelty of the parents’ actions that are to the fore, thereby complicating the notion of reward and justice. Accepting pain is Michal’s unconditional gift to his brother. Divine intervention in “The Little Green Pig” maintains the uniqueness of the little green pig, comfortable in his eccentricity and peculiarity, and it serves as Michal’s parting gift to Maria. Considerations of guilt are crucial, particularly when mind and act are not in harmony, the notions of “comeuppance”, the idea of “the child’s side”, justice as self-defence, and the concept of state justice facilitated by the play’s totalitarian regime all overlap here. Each form of justice is shadowed by McDonagh’s diasporic reflex to foreground the idea of miscarriages of justice perpetrated on the Irish community in Britain during the 1970s forward, without whitewashing how a minority of migrants gave support to such paramilitary campaigns, by actions, money, cultural reinforcement and ideological legitimation, or collusive silence. The play’s justice formations are also stalked by the lip-service to justice made by democratic societies, especially during times of crisis, and it seems like democracy is always in some crisis.

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In Pillowman, neither individual characters nor the state is entirely troubled by impartiality, lack of objectivity, due process, the right to a defence, by any fallout from actual or perceived miscarriages of justice. Although set in an unidentified authoritarian state, differences between totalitarian systems of justice and democratic ones are not as substantial as one might like to think. Totalitarianism always self-justifies the lengths to which it will go in order to protect the state and its citizens, as individual rights come at the expense of the collective wellbeing. In some respects, totalitarianism is a soft and valid target, but it is often as much the stuff of nightmares as it is the terrain of fairy tale. The violence of self-defence, mercy-killing inspired actions, horrific totalitarian state injustice, and the justice expectations of fairy tales intermingle. Additionally, there are rival and incompatible systems of justice in operation, yet in each instance, there is little by way of affirming the merits of comparative forms of justice that are central to Sen’s ideas on justice. Instead, the pervasiveness of bigotry, embedded prejudices, and the failures of “coarse reasoning”, or the “primitive and very defective reasoning” that Sen opposes are all too apparent in the miscarriages of justice that Pillowman and the earlier discussed Hangmen rely upon for dramaturgical and performance impact (xviii).

Works

cited

Baron-Cohen, Simon. 2011. Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. London: Allen Lane. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1976, reprinted 1991. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Penguin Books. Bracher, Karl Dietrich. 1981. “The Disputed Concept of Totalitarianism: Experience and Actuality.” In Totalitarianism Reconsidered, edited by E.A. Menze, 12–21. New York and London: Kennikat Press. Brantley, Ben. 1999. “Another Tempestuous Night in Leenane (Sure, It’s Not a Morn in Spring).” New York Times, 28 April. https://www.nytimes. com/1999/04/28/theater/theater-review-another-tempestuous-nightleenane-sure-it-s-not-morn-spring.html. Dargis, Manohla. 2008. “Hit Men on Holiday Get All Medieval.” New York Times, 8 April. http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/movies/08brug. html. Fitzpatrick Dean, Joan. 2009. “In Bruges.” Estudios Irlandeses—A Journal of Irish Studies (4): 166–169. https://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/wp-content/ uploads/2013/06/pdfTheYearinIrishFilmandTV2008.pdf.

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Hanly, Conor, 2006. An Introduction to Irish Criminal Law, 2nd ed. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. James, Caryn. 2006. “Martin McDonagh Finds His Inner Thug as Film Director.” New York Times, 4 April. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/movies/ 04jame.html. Jordan, Eamonn. 2006. “War on Narrative: Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman.” In The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan, 174–197. Dublin: Carysfort Press. King, Geoff. 2011. “Striking a Balance Between Culture and Fun: Quality Meets Hitman Genre in In Bruges.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9 (2): 132–151. Landesman, Cosmo. 2008. “Review of In Bruges.” The Sunday Times, 20 April. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/ film_reviews/article3758013.ece. Melnikova, Irina. 2013. “In(visible) Bruges by Martin McDonagh.” Journal of European Studies 43 (1): 44–59. Moriarty, Gerry. 2016. “Paddy Hill of Birmingham Six Fame Still Fighting the Good Fight.” The Irish Times, 1 February. http://www.irishtimes.com/ news/crime-and-law/paddy-hill-of-birmingham-six-fame-still-fightingthe-good-fight-1.2517257. Müller, Péter P. 2009. “Body Politics in a Fictitious Eastern European Dictatorship: Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman.” In Literary and Cultural Relations: Ireland, Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mária Kurdi, 47–64. Dublin: Carysfort Press. O’Brien, Catherine. 2012. “In Bruges, Heaven or Hell?” Literature & Theology 26 (1): 93–105. Pilný, Ondřej. 2006. “Grotesque Entertainment: The Pillowman as Puppet Theatre.” In The Theatre of Martin McDonagh: A World of Savage Stories, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan, 214–223. Dublin: Carysfort Press. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity. London: Penguin Books. Purcell, Bernard. 1999. “‘Appalling Vista’ Judge Dies at 100.” Irish Independent, 6 March 1999. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/appalling-vista-judgedies-at-100-26155585.html. Ravenhill, Mark. 2004. “A Tear in the Fabric: The James Bulger Murder and New Theatre Writing in the Nineties.” New Theatre Quarterly 20 (4): 305–314. Rouse, Margitta. 2011. “‘Hit Men on Holiday Get All Medieval’: Multiple Temporalities and Media Theory in Martin McDonagh’s in Bruges.” European Journal of English Studies 15 (2): 171–182.

74  E. JORDAN Sandel, Michael, J. 2009. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sen, Amartya. 2010. The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin. Worthen, Hanna, and B. Worthen. 2006. “The Pillowman and the Ethics of Allegory.” Modern Drama 49 (2): 155–173. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ modern_drama/v049/49.2worthen.html.

CHAPTER 4

“Self-Help” Justice and the Vigilante Victim’s Conundrum

Abstract  In part, this chapter looks at the issue of individual and collective victimisation, in terms of historical injustices created by imperialism and the extensive consequences of colonial subjugation. Responses to state crimes can result in paramilitarism as perceived in the term “freedom fighting”, to anarchic guerrilla-warfare, as seen in The Lieutenant of Inishmore and A Very Very Very Dark Matter, respectively. Additionally, the actions of a lone wolf vigilante doling out “self-help” justice is at the core of A Behanding in Spokane. Seven Psychopaths looks at various forms of protest justice, from pacifist stalking to self-immolation. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri considers grief, the depths of rage that transpire when justice is neither done nor seen to be done, but most of all, how the side-lining of civilised protest might transpose measured actions into abhorrent vigilantism. Keywords  Kangaroo courts · Vigilante actions Imperialism · Creativity · Affirmative action

· Whiteness · Race ·

Introduction This chapter covers five works, three plays, Inishmore and Spokane and Dark Matter, and two films, Psychopaths and Billboards. Sen’s proposition is that those in positions of power have substantial, even “unilateral” justice-orientated obligations (206), but does it follow that those with © The Author(s) 2019 E. Jordan, Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30453-9_4

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less power, or who speak back to power, and who seek revenge, who want to resist subjugation, and who wish to take justice into their own hands, have different sorts of obligations, and that is not necessarily to say that they are lower-ordered ones? What differentiates the monsters that intimidate, deny detainees due process, tamper with evidence, frame the innocent, and execute people to paramilitary figures who bomb pubs and those who kill civilians or those who practise vigilante justice? How do we position those who obsessively seek out revenge for harm done, who resort out of necessity to violence as a self-defence or last resort, or those whose protest against the insufficiency of the law by breaking the law? And if distinctions between victim and perpetrator start to collapse, while the frailties of the state law are variously exposed, where does that leave justice? As Sandel notes “Justice is inescapably judgemental” (259). For Steven Pinker, an “urge for revenge can be so implacable, consuming and sometimes self-defeating” (647), adding “[j]ust deserts may well be ‘basically citizens’ impulse for revenge” (49–50). This chapter teases out how justice might be further evaluated, how restitution feeds formulations of justice, and how justice can be the cloak that disguises revenge, a bloodlust to make someone or anyone pay.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore: To the Victim the Spoils of Justice The Royal Shakespeare Company produced The Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2001, before it transferred to the Barbican and then to the West End the following year, in each instance Wilson Milam directed. The work has been widely performed, including Michael Grandage’s 2018 production in the West End. When McDonagh’s paramilitary figures in Inishmore take victimisation, duty and unshakable principles as the legitimisation of a violence of last resort against the British State and its perceived associates and beneficiaries, the police, military and unionist/loyalist communities, the possibility of some future regret seems improbable. Neither fear nor uncertainty that such ends might not justify the means has any impact on their actions. And in a continuing age of international terrorism, what may well be unsettling, even petrifying, are the distressing levels of self-confidence, self-assurance and fanatical certainty that such paramilitary characters bring to their expression of their alternative forms of justice. In this instance it is a revolutionary Republicanism, which proposes a resistance

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strategy to the occupation of the six counties as they saw it, combining the Armalite and the ballot box, a combination that is ultimately at odds with constitutional politics and peaceful means. Inishmore is set in 1993 on Inishmore, one of three Aran Islands, off County Galway, just before the establishment of the Downing Street Declaration (1994) that effectively led to paramilitary ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. This play was written in response to the Warrington bombing on 20 March 1993, which resulted in the deaths of Jonathan Ball (aged 3) and Tim Parry (aged 12). Henry McDonald argues that “McDonagh was not sucked into the ‘Brits Out’ bar ballad culture that used to exist in north London and south Boston” (2008). McDonagh links the writing of this play to the already cited “pacifist rage” (O’Hagan 2001), and what he later re-frames as “pure moral outrage” (Chambers 2018). Outrage as a companion to reason, is not something Sen shies away from (399). Personal attitudes to republicanism and knowledge of the Northern Irish situation will impact on what the spectator will regard as humorous/contentious in a play that relies very much on anarchic farce. Inishmore’s inciting incident is the intentional killing by paramilitary figures of [Mad] Padraic’s cat, Wee Thomas, with the collective aim is to lure Padraic home so that they can assassinate him. The feline executioners belong to the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and not the larger Provisional IRA. The play ends with four characters dead. The historical injustices of colonisation, the political partition of the island of Ireland by the British Government in 1921, age-old sectarian conflicts, the discriminations faced by a Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, the brutality of the British Army in situations like the Ballymurphy Massacre (1971) or during the Bloody Sunday killings (1972) and a belief in a violence of defence and last resort against police, military, and loyalist groups were the grounds that justified or legitimised the physical force tradition of republicanism. Consequently, the British State’s actions, in the form of the army and police, are seen as against justice, and set free from the rule of the law, when murders were carried out with immunity. In such a context, paramilitary actions are deemed remedial, noble and heroic, rather than brutal or unjust, making those that take up arms, freedom fighters, combatants and armed resisters and certainly not insurgents or terrorists. They did not start the war, it was brought to them, the argument goes. Perceived infractions of injustice infuse their overarching sense of self-defensive, retributive, paramilitary

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violence. A thirty-two-county, free and just Ireland is the ideological super-objective. The illegitimacy of colonial invasion from an Irish point of view is always countered by a British ideology that frames imperialism as a more benign, civilising and legitimate activity, and indigenous resistance, including political agitation, parliamentary debating and lobbying is regarded as unnecessarily troublesome and revolutionary militant activities are invariably deemed predominantly pathological, without mandate. Seamus Deane points out how imperialism structures rebellion as barbaric and uncivilised, but is less interested, even declines to address how paramilitaries do likewise (39). If rationality, personal and public debate are key to Sen’s reflections on the enhancements of justice, McDonagh’s black farce captures the illogicality, irrationalities, self-deceptions, blatant double standards, and refusal to debate, which are partially evident in vague recollections about historic grievances, and in the useless fragments of legal terms and philosophical catchphrases upon which his revolutionary characters are heavily reliant. These characters ignore their own ideological inconsistencies as they substantiate their grievances and claims on legitimacy and justice, whilst refusing to recognise the claims of others on justice. Traditionally, republican propagandists have vigorously exploited various miscarriages of justice to advance their own ideological arguments, whereas Padraic’s response to Mairead’s request to accompany her to see Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father (1993), a film about aspects of the Guildford Four case, distorts such a position. Not only does Padraic decline her offer, he proposes that the Guildford Four should stop whining about their innocence and surrender their rights of protestation. In this alone, his malign and maverick disposition, his disinterest in justice, and the sheer paucity of his thinking confirm that Padraic marches to his own ideological beat and is invariably out of step, with the most general and widespread of responses to blatant miscarriages of justice. Grievance and injustices do not lead directly to an absolute entitlement of violence, even under the doctrine of self-defence. In the play, the victim/perpetrator model is of a different order: victimisation seems to licence paramilitary actions, without accountability or obligations. Joey is the only paramilitary figure that questions, however ineffectively, his group’s deeds. Additionally, McDonagh confronts the bespoke purity of republican ideology by associating republicanism with criminality, through drug dealing and extortion, and he also illustrates

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the denial of natural justice evident in the euphemistically titled “punishment beatings,” as carried out by paramilitaries. In many republican/nationalist strongholds of Northern Ireland underhand figures dominated communities with conquest and conciliation policing strategies that would make any imperialist proud. Both republicans and loyalists did so as some form of swift and reactionary alternative community policing (restorative justice), in response to the inadequacies and distrust of state policing. Such a vigilante system of kangaroo courts involved judgments, torture, mutilation, banishments, executions and disappearances. The paramilitary rule of law offered no right to a defence, no presumption of innocence and left no channels open to appeal its findings. Such secret courts and clandestine investigations were sometimes used to cover up the actions of paramilitary elites, when pretend justice was meted out to keep victims quiet, particularly in investigations into “rogue actions,” or the sexual abuse of minors and adults. Sexual assault victims like Maria Cahill were denied recourse to their natural justice to preserve the reputations of key members of the Republican hierarchy (Cahill 2017). The preference of republicans for kangaroo courts to deal with anti-social behaviour is one thing, and to have strong community support for much of it is another, but to deny justice to these victims of sex abuse is shocking, as is the communal silence imposed when republicans kill or maim other members of their community. In all instances such actions are both frightening and a perversion of duty, purpose, honour and virtue that Sandel associates with justice. Padraic’s reputation for extreme violence is countered by his incompetence as a paramilitary activist; bombs placed in chip shops do not go off or he loses his list of valid targets on a bus. Padraic is violent because of his sadistic, pathological desires—a republican justice agenda seems like a convenience that affords expression to this impulse. Sixteen-year-old Mairead promises her mother that she will try but cannot reassure her that she will not be involved in the murder of children when she goes to Northern Ireland to fight for the cause of Irish freedom. This exchange points towards both the broader issue of communal collusion with paramilitary objectives as well as the tolerance of collateral damage. These paramilitary characters are seemingly obsessed with justice but are also unburdened by the normal tenets and processes of justice. Sen’s idea that fairness, impartiality, reasonableness, objectivity, defensibility and self-justification should inform principles of justice are clearly not

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honoured or espoused by these rebels (196). Sen argues that those that are most magnanimous about justice are neither obsessively narrow in their focus on their own principles and demands of justice, nor are they unwilling to see how differential claims on justice must be both recognised and accommodated. If Sen’s purpose is to bring sustainable reason to issues of justice, McDonagh abandons logic, debate, rigorous analysis in this instance. Instead McDonagh brings the maniacal, anarchic sensibility of farce to expose the ideology of republican paramilitaries, associating nothing noble and heroic with it. The unifocal, self-righteous, exclusivist, non-inclusive and myopic republican claim on justice is further discommoded by the implications of the return of the long-thought dead cat, Wee Thomas. An awareness that all the carnage has been for nothing is Donny and Davey’s summative position. For Sen, the dialogue between, Krishna and Arjuna in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata is an important one: the former’s argument is based on “duty irrespective of consequences” (209), and the latter is consequence alert, and how the fallout from actions may hinder the imperatives of one’s duty, even when it is the right thing to do. For example, not tackle tyranny and leave it in its place rather than confront tyranny which then results in awful outcomes for many. The dilemma is between “consequence-independent” and “consequence-sensitive” positions, as Sen proposes (210). In that regard, it does not matter entirely who took the war to whom. For republicans, an accumulation of injustices prompted a duty to defend and revolt. Their refusal to be either outcome sensitive or to foresee consequences, in the form of responsibility for the human cost of collateral damage, always has been a fundamental failure that undermines paramilitary justification, and not just republicans. Further, in Inishmore, republicanism is presented as an ideology that is ahistorical at best and an essentialist fabrication at worst. Paramilitary justice is found wanting, and all the political spin doctoring of that fact cannot suppress that conclusion. Moreover, history is increasingly unkind to the republican military campaign, despite the propagandist massaging of facts and manipulative subterfuge. That over half the 3500-plus people killed during the Troubles were innocent bystanders, with no direct connection to the “War” is an insurmountable fact, and that is not to account for those wounded, traumatised, permanently incapacitated and bereaved. That said, this is not to disregard the merits and benefits of the Northern

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Ireland peace process and the costs that had to be borne my many, particularly the early release of those convicted of murders. Mary Luckhurst argues that the play fails to offer inclusive political debate, declines any recognition of prior colonial wrongdoings, and offers no semblance of vindication for the paramilitary actions of the characters (34–41). Accordingly, for her, the play is pro-British in its pathologizing of resistance. Republicanism has enough commentators willing to substantiate their ideology and violent actions, and a writer like McDonagh has no obligations to be balanced and bring all sides under equal scrutiny. Indeed, it could be argued that the demands made by the likes of Luckhurst serve as a form of creative censorship. While McDonagh’s play is not as open as Sen might like it to be, McDonagh is still free to be as admiring, scathing, dismissive and disarming of republicanism as he wants to be. Why can the actions of the characters not propose that no legacy of history or the ills of colonialism can justify reprehensible violence? No grievance or victim status confers inalienable rights that amount to unaccountability. Indeed, can hegemonic republicanism, steered by marquee, paramilitary elites, be any better than hegemonic imperialism, if it is so consequent-insensitive? A better question may be who incites, who risks and who benefits most from a paramilitary situation and from the whitewashing of truth? Ultimately, while Brendan, Christy and Joey are limited to wonder who coined the term “the ends justify the means,” they refrain from any consideration as to why there might be no justification of either means or ends, when interim, feasible and progressive constitutional solutions were on the table from the early 1970s in Northern Ireland. The bigotry, sectarianism and discriminations of the Northern Irish state, while appalling, never had its equivalence in the apartheid state of South Africa. Today, attempts to erase the voice and actions of constitutional politicians from the history of Northern Ireland are a constant one, as are the actions in 1993 by those who formed a Peace Movement in response to the Warrington Bombing and generated huge public support for non-violent methods to generate a political solution. From some accounts, only the heroism of gunmen/women advanced the political solution, which is factually and fatally false. Sen believes that the relevant standard of ethical principles is linked to “their defensibility in an open and free framework of public reasoning. Other people’s perspective and assessments as well as interests would have a role here in a way that rationality alone need not demand” (196).

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A recognition of a “multiplicity of competing principles” is regarded by Sen as being important (200). For Sen then, an absence of “positional objectivity” (157), the presence of bias, a “positional-independent view” (161), or “open impartiality” (162) all need consideration. Sen also warns of “positional illusions” (169), based on the Marxian notion of “objective illusion” (163). He continues: “What is important … is not any presumption that people invariably act in a rational way, but rather the idea that people are not altogether alienated from the demands of rationality” (178). This is an admission that people can get things wrong or fail to follow through on the “dictates of reason in each and every case” (178). A belief in “reasoned scrutiny” and “critical sustainability” ensure that alleged reasons must survive “searching and critical examination” (Sen, 180). Equally, for Sen, more than one competing reason can survive such scrutiny. He claims, if we accept a “plurality of sustainable reasons,” a justice beyond self-interest is possible (183). In debates on the conflict and conditions of Northern Ireland, rationality does not beget rationality, debate is not dialectical, but about dominance and self-justification. The irrationality of farce is one way of provoking and scrutinising the narrowness of fixed and pre-determined ideological positions. A British Government perspective of current disinterest could not disguise its imperial contribution to the situation, its substantiation of sectarian inequalities, the horrors of over the top and covered up military actions and its collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. And the British State refuses to acknowledge that is has not been the impartial or passive force it claims to be. A unionist perspective could not hide its sectarianism and how it gained from discrimination, its stoking of trouble, its unyielding positioning, its reluctance to negotiate, and its inciting of its own paramilitary allies. A republican viewpoint, rather than nationalist one, could not evade the fact that it was willing to use unconscionable violence to force a political settlement. Vitriol, illogicality, hatred, fear, and exploitation rather than rationality, debate and discourse in a public arena were other forms of collateral damage. Most negligent to Sen’s mind, is an inability or unwillingness to give validity to claims on justice from another’s point of view. While there is an obvious rational case to be made against the injustices of imperial actions, and even for a violence of last resort, what paramilitary terrorism is fundamentally lacking are the subtler forms of justice as argued

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by Sandel, whose work brings together issues of public good, civic duty, honour and virtue. For Sandel “as Aristotle reminds us, to argue about the purpose of a social institution is to argue about the virtues it honours and rewards” (251). Many victims of the troubles and the bereaved link justice and closure to the revelation of truths, and that remains unhonoured. Retributive or restorative acts of justice remain off-limit rewards. Post-peace process republicans ignore not only the residuals of violence that remained long after ceasefires and the decommissioning process, they also overlook the role of paramilitary godfathers in various forms of criminality, from extortion to illegal cigarette smuggling, from fuel laundering and the pollution it causes to bank robberies. The costs of peace and the advent of new politics were the loss of the middle ground, constitutionally inclined parties, a dishonourable consequence of peace. If one lives under a regime where there are systemic injustices or where one feels that one has no recourse to justice, it is a challenge to remain passive. If the actions of others, police, military, sectarian gangs, are deemed beyond the law, it seems understandable why people will take the fight to justice. But when does virtuous self-defiance and reasonable force, become unreasonable, dishonourable and unjustifiable actions? Apologists for paramilitarism refuse to express accountability, until the other side does so as well, convenienced by the argument that there should be no hierarchy of victimhood. And it is the disregard for collateral damage above all else that leaves the justifications for paramilitary violence utterly exposed as not honouring the ‘common good’ and being without the appropriate degree of ‘virtue’ that Sandel signals. McDonagh makes this point in relation to paramilitarism, without exposing imperialism directly, but he goes on to expose colonial practices in Dark Matter. It is almost impossible to align unscrupulous killers as simply victims of imperial barbarism, or unscrupulous imperialism as a victim of legitimate freedom fighting. McDonagh advocates that justice at any cost is not justice. Good Samaritan Davey barely survives; his virtue is out of place in the carnage and violence that surrounds him. He is the one figure, clown-like or not, who is alone in seeking out “the right way to value things.” The precariousness of his set of values are very evident. It is a play which ends with a stage covered in blood and with Donny and Davey tasked with dismembering the executed paramilitaries, while denying traditional eulogising and funerary practices associated with the burial of slain republicans. It is a work that uses the mayhem of farce for its own anarchic purpose.

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(See Jordan 2009, for an analysis of the significance of the play’s genre and the political importance of dismemberment and denial of funerary practices.) The blatant propagandist failings of the characters in Inishmore indirectly suggests how republicanism at times clearly demonstrates strategic and propaganda nous, and one can call that cunning, manipulation or persuasiveness. Revolutionary republicans in Inishmore fail to stay on message, because they do not even know what that basic message is. Their ideology is far from bullet-proof. They cannot be ruthless or so wilfully disregarding for both the collective good and consequences of their actions and lay claim to justice, the near impossibility of being a victim/perpetrator.

A Behanding in Spokane: An Avenger’s/Revenger’s Tragedy A Behanding in Spokane premiered on 4 March 2010 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, New York, with John Crowley directing. As with almost any Broadway production, having renowned actors like Christopher Walken (Carmichael), Zoe Kazan (Marilyn), Anthony Mackie (Toby) and Sam Rockwell (Mervyn) perform in the premier of a play, does help to promote the work. In the notional town of Tarlington, the Caucasian-American Carmichael holds African-American Toby hostage in a dilapidated hotel room, while his Caucasian-American girlfriend, Marilyn, goes to retrieve a chopped-off hand from their living quarters. The two small-time cannabis dealers are trying to pass off a hand of an ancient Australian aborigine that they stole from a natural history museum as the hand Carmichael has spent twenty-seven years tracking, coincidentally the same age as Toby. This road-trip takes Carmichael amongst the low-life, “haggling with street scum and shaking down corpse-dealers across the filth-lots and flea-alleys of this sad decaying nation” (BS, 11). Mervyn, the third Caucasian-American character, works behind the desk of this hotel and fantasises about various scenarios that might occur, unusual guests arriving with improbable luggage (harpoons or rollercoasters), and him getting rewarded for selfless, heroic actions during a major incident: “Maybe a prostitute would get stabbed and I’d have to go rescue her? Or some lesbians would get stabbed,” and he would be awarded a “protecting lesbians medal” (BS, 21). Mervyn also fantasises

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about a high school shooting incident; his fictive scenario requires twelve fatalities for his heroism to be of substance. Upon hearing gunshots, Mervyn does not call the police, instead he sets out to situate himself into the evolving scenario. Mervyn’s heroic intent is less driven by altruism, and more by deviancy, voyeurism, prurience and by an innate self-destructiveness. Two years previously, Toby had allegedly “stiffed” Mervyn in a “speed deal,” Mervyn’s sense of injustice is tangible, and none of Toby’s diversionary tactics, including the accusation of utilising false race identifiers and biased AfricanAmerican categorisations, can distract from Mervyn’s accusation (BS, 22). Marilyn’s tendency to believe Mervyn suggests that this may not be the first occasion that Toby has scammed someone in this way. Carmichael is disturbed, resilient and unrelenting in the tracking down of his missing hand, an object that he knows is of no real use to him, but it has massive emblematic significance. The loss was suffered when his hand was cut off in an unprovoked and random attack by a group of “hillbilly detritus” (BS, 11). They forced his hand onto a train track and the oncoming locomotive did the rest. Leaving the scene of the crime, the hillbillies used the excised hand to wave goodbye to him. Carmichael’s motivation to go after those who assaulted him seems understandable, his vigilante/mercenary actions have resulted in numerous casualties, or so he alleges. In terms of justice, notions of victim and perpetrator are again obscured. Carmichael’s quest takes him to the dark corners of American society, where the American dream is no happy-ever-after fantasy of endeavour, progress and reward, but populated by the strange, the obscene, taboo violations, and the unlawful. (The sale of extracted body parts also reflects on the notion of the marketplace, the neo-liberal conviction that it is possible to trade in almost anything.) Moreover, Carmichael’s is a violation configured as a fundamental and symbolic injustice of sorts. However, the story accounting for the loss of his hand is variously disputed by each of the other characters. The emerging consensus is that it is a concocted story, not quite in the territory of false memory or in the terrain of delusionality. Toby’s view is that he has seen something like it in a movie one time, and Mervyn’s web research fuels the suspicion that Carmichael might have done it to himself. The implausible locomotive scenario would not lead to such a clean cut, rather the remainder of the arm would now be “mush” (BS, 43).

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Apotemnophilia, a non-delusional and non-psychotic condition, according to V.S. Ramachandran and Paul McGeoch (2007, 251), is something that I have linked extensively to Carmichael’s motivation in previous work (Jordan 2012, 447–461). Apotemnophilia is a condition where individuals obsess over the removal of a limb or body part, and once that is realised they tend to be content. Medically, procedural amputation is outlawed, but that does not stop illegal amputations. With this condition, external body and internal body map within consciousness do not align. “[M]ismatch aversion” provides the most relevant explanation, according to Ramachandran, because the offending limb is regarded as an “overpresence,” or an “overcompleteness,” an excess that needs removal (255–256). In my analysis of the dramatic situation, it is not so much Carmichael’s individual character psychology that needs unpacking. More so, it is the sense of the socio-political ramifications of notions of “over-presence” or “over-completeness”, especially when associated with race. The missing hand is divisively coded and imagined, and it interconnects with various other recurrences of hands in the play, the gloved raised fist associated with the Black Panther movement, the Aboriginal hand the scammers try to pass off, and the collection of chopped-off hands, including those of children that Carmichael’s case contains. The case with the cut-off hands reminds one of the trophies gathered by serial killers, mad scientists, body snatchers and grave robbers found in dystopian fiction, horror movies, in Grand-Guignol and the Theatre of the Absurd. If Carmichael’s initial hunt for his hand is not directly related to the issues of race, then the blackness of the hand that Marilyn and Toby try to pass off as Carmichael’s own is one conclusive link. When Marilyn disparagingly remarks on Toby’s lack of heroism: “[…] where’s all your Black Panther shit now, cry-baby? Where’s all your ‘Fight the powers that be’ now, huh?” (BS, 15). Toby’s apparent cowardice is exposed by her linking his inept behaviours with the empowering endeavours of the Black Panther movement, an African-American group that opposed racial inequality. Additionally, Marilyn’s political correctness is both inappropriate and redundant in the situation that they find themselves, so it cannot but be played for laughs. The sight of Toby and Marilyn chained and doused in petrol is an antagonistic and provocative gesture, interlinking slavery, injustice, gender, class and inequality.

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Steven Pinker notes that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries: at least 1.5 million Africans died in transatlantic slave ships… [and] ­millions more perished in forced marches through the jungles and deserts to slave markets [….] At least 17 million Africans and perhaps as many as 65 million, died in the slave trade. The slave trade not only killed people in transit, but by providing a continuous stream of bodies, it encouraged slaveholders to work their slaves to death and replace them with new ones. But even the slaves who were kept in relatively good health lived in the shadow of flogging, rape, mutilation, forced separation from family members and summary execution. (185)

At the broadest of historic levels first, as Pinker suggests, slaves were taken, easily replaceable, bought, sold, denied basic needs and exterminated. Slavery was marked by horrendous actions of discipline and punishment-related violence that Pinker mentions, plus starvation, disfigurements, castrations. The mutilations of various limbs were commonplace, in response to disobedience, non-cooperation, theft, and attempts to escape captivity. Systems of slavery were designed to dehumanise those held against their will, but also dehumanised owners in different ways. Historically, the laws of various nations legitimised such horrors, until slavery’s abolition, but the consequences of such actions are traced through to modern societies, best seen in the persistence of race segregation and discriminations, and in class and gender-related inequalities. Despite efforts to foster inclusion, assimilation and engage in affirmative action, widespread and consistent racism still haunts America and other first world and developing societies. Late in the play Mervyn plans to lie to the arriving police with a tale of a black male chasing a white girl, knowing that this story will be enough to steer them away from what has transpired in the hotel room. Innate racist inclinations of the police force are signalled here, as they are in Billboards. Carmichael’s mother, Angela, is as racist as he is. Situational incongruity is exposed with the remarks: “… Hey Ma, I’m the one decides if the niggers die around here, okay? I don’t need your goddam racist advice!” (BS, 39). Equally, the complex constructions/deconstructions to be found in Carmichael’s comments below are indictments of perverse racist logic: [….] Alright, yes I do find some black women attractive [….] That doesn’t mean I’m not a racist [….] Look, I’m standing here right now, okay, there is a black man chained to my radiator, and he’s covered in gasoline, now that’s hardly Affirmative Action, now is it? (BS, 38)

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The moment is outrageous because of what the narrative uncomfortably juxtapositions. The writing is opening itself up to be regarded as offensive, if we take that there are taboo areas where it is impossible to find humour. His admission to finding black women attractive, based on the content of his stash of pornographic magazines, connects sex, race and objectification on the one hand, and on the other, demonstrates how sexual desire may confound racist thought, given the absurdity of the mother/son relationship itself. Indeed, across the play, Carmichael’s language loosely interconnects racism and homophobia, as Dixon initially does in Billboards. McDonagh allows Carmichael to use politically incorrect, offensive terms, not to delight in taboo transgression, and not to be offensive for offensiveness’s sake, rather with the intention being to expose racism. The time before the limb loss is seen by Carmichael almost in pastoral terms, suggestive also of a myth of racial harmony and purity. The unwillingness by parts of American and other cultures to either acknowledge difference, or to accept that theirs is an unequal society, discriminatory in terms of race, is unconscionable. Festering racism and xenophobia have fear at their core, according to Žižek, and it is a fear that populism is currently exploiting globally (35). Mervyn hurriedly helps Carmichael to tidy up, to put some order on the chaos with police sirens approaching outside. Mervyn’s discovery of a hand with the word “Hate” on it, written in pen rather than permanently tattooed, capstones that obligation towards non-rationality as a response. The hand discovered by Mervyn is a partial match: Carmichael has a sense that Toby did it to discomfit, again there is no explanation, but further reinforcement of the notion of “mismatch aversion”. In his review of the play, Hilton Als has no time for McDonagh’s handling of the issue of race and accuses him of duplicating racial inequality in his dramaturgy. Als argues that McDonagh’s use of pejorative racist terms causes offence full stop, offensively links blackness with criminality, and obliges black actors to play roles that portray black characters in de-humanising ways. Als ignores the fact that the most deviant, criminal and corrupt characters in the play, Carmichael and Mervyn, are Caucasian-Americans. Secondly, Als’s summation takes little account of how Walken and Rockwell performed their roles: to my mind, racist comments were delivered, Brechtian-like “in quotation marks”—on the one hand, ungrounded in a realist performance style, and, on the other, signalled as being alert to and foregrounding provocatively their inherent offence. The offences were undermined by showing how obnoxious

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a cultural/political reflex they are, compounded by the inadequacies and inappropriateness of Marilyn’s high-minded political correctness. Humour arises when Marilyn checks Toby for not supporting her on appropriate terminology; he is more concerned with their survival than taking offence at Carmichael’s use of the “N” word. The producers of the show were quick to refute Als’s allegations, as was McDonagh. If Carmichael’s racism points towards a sense of racial difference that he cannot contend with, there is also the sense that he represents wholesale and widespread white privilege that wants to ignore its own advantages. Instead, his is a desire to position his own whiteness in victim mode, and to see various injustices around whiteness as initiated or qualified by issues of racial abundance or “over-presence”. Swarmed by feelings of others taking what is rightfully theirs, individuals like Carmichael are fundamentally threatened by additional claims on America itself, and overwhelmed by the propagation and additional presence of racial diversity. White privilege’s claims on injustice are invariably found wanting, particularly in the light of historic horrors and their legacies, consequence insensitivity as Sen would have it. Rather than acknowledge historic and contemporary horrors of race injustices, the easier tack is to wallow in white victimhood, manufacture or exaggerate trauma, which serves as a form of reverse and perverse entitlement. White privilege wants to affirm its dominance by prioritising its own sense of victimhood, denying not least hierarchies and disparities of victimisation. Carmichael’s sense of white privilege disguised as victimhood is exposed as a fabricated, unfounded and utterly biased and delusional myth of its own fundamental injustice. The part-quest narrative, part-caper tragicomedy drama, has echoes of films like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and the absurd grail-quest in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). By the play’s end, McDonagh collapses Carmichael’s revenge justice narrative by deeming it irrelevant and self-indulgent, white privilege and protectionism run amok.

Seven Psychopaths: Vigilantism and Sacrifice as Perverse Protest Against Injustices On its release in 2012 Psychopaths divided critics. Some saw it as strange, convoluted, but a compulsively complex and riveting work, others as indulgent, over-written and excessively self-aware, too meta for meta’s

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sake. In an interview with Joe Utichi, McDonagh states that he wanted it to be a film: “about Buddhism and peace and love, at the same time as making a Sam Peckinpah film—to me, his films were anti-violence, too, about the doomed nature of violent men.” McDonagh admits to Utichi that Psychopaths is his response to the fact that “every single movie poster has a guy with a gun on it. It’s so cheap and easy and thick” (16–17). If it is difficult to have your cake and eat it, McDonagh makes a real attempt to do so. Psychopaths opens with a scene set on Lake Hollywood reservoir, beneath the iconic sign of ‘Hollywood’ built into Los Angeles’s Mt Lee. Two hitmen, Tommy (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Larry (Michael Pitt) chat in a way where there is little to distinguish between fact and fiction. Torture techniques in Cuba are discussed, assassinations they previously carried out are mentioned, some quickfire reflections are made about John Dillinger, whose criminality has been frequently fictionalised in Hollywood movies, and the killing of The Godfather’s (1972) Moe Greene is deliberated. Side-tracked by their chit-chat, they are executed before they can complete their own planned hit. Psychopaths pairs an Irish screenwriter, Marty Faranan (Colin Farrell) with Billy Bickle (Sam Rockwell). Marty has writer’s block and is struggling to make sense of his own and Hollywood’s obsessions with violence, and Billy Bickle is a jobbing, out of work actor, who through the personae of Jack of Diamonds has a vigilante mission to kill mid-to-high ranking members of Italian-American organised crime syndicates or perhaps the Yakuza. Billy’s claim that he is simply targeting underworld figures becomes more complex with an audience’s awareness of his affair with Angela (Olga Kurylenko), girlfriend of a criminal, Charlie Costello (Woody Harrelson). The surname Bickle links him to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), and the name Costello to Irish-American criminal gangs and the Frank Costello character (Jack Nicholson) in Scorsese’s The Departed (2006). Billy has a parttime dog-napping business with Hans (Christopher Walken), and Billy targets Bonny, Costello’s beloved Shih Tzu. If Billy is anarchic in response to the world, his vigilante destructiveness is the film’s major driving force, while Marty’s struggle to write himself away from his standard output and to move towards expressions of peace and love are complicated by how such optimistic utterances can be summoned from a world full of injustice. By co-joining brutal localised murders of the innocent and not so innocent (serial killers) with

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high casualty events like the Vietnam War, Marty gives creative expression to the notion of protest, which combines issues of revenge and justice with forms of dissent, some passive and some self-sacrificing. In one narrative, Vietnam War veteran (Long Nguyen) heads home to find that his family and many of those living in his village have been decimated by a military atrocity. It is the Mỹ Lai massacre, where American soldiers attacked, raped and murdered up to 500 unarmed civilians, something that gave rise to military inquiries that led to a whitewashing of facts (BBC 1998). This soldier’s thirst for retributive justice takes him to America, first attacking and mutilating six members of Charlie Company, and then his attention turns to the First Battalion of the 20th Infantry Regiment’s Convention in Phoenix. His plan involves a prostitute (Christine Marzano) being forced to wear a suicide vest into a convention hall. The next story as a response to injustice is a love story of sorts. While in the process of stealing from the home of a Delacroy judge, 17-year old Zachariah (Brendan Sexton III and later Tom Waits), discovers the barely alive Maggie (Amanda Warren only, no older self), who is being held captive in the basement, where there are also the remains of two young black women. Maggie and Zachariah’s hanging of the judge sets them off in pursuit of notorious serial killers. They are vengeance-seeking couple executing ignoble serial killers, including, the Texarkana Moonlight Murderer (1947), the Butcher of Kingsbury Run (also known as the Cleveland Torso Murderer) (1954), and the Zodiac killer (1975). During the execution of the notorious Zodiac (Richard Wharton) the couple fall out over Zachariah’s reluctance to see it through in all its brutality, him fearful that pet rabbits will be harmed in the process. Their collective/romantic bond over vengeful justice is violently and irresolvably shattered. Marty’s Quaker story is about a killer (James Hébert) who murders a young woman, goes to jail, finds God, seeks forgiveness, is paroled, but is disturbed by the constant pursuit of him by the father of the dead girl (Harry Dean Stanton). When the murderer decides that hell is the only place where he can be free from his pacifist pursuant—a Catholic tract informs him that suicide is a sin that cannot be forgiven— he opts for hell, only for the father, who witnesses the suicidal act, to mimic him, and attempts to take his own life, allowing him to follow through his desire to pursue his daughter’s killer even to the realm of the damned. However, Marty’s delight in the telling of this story at a party

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is punctured by Billy’s reminder that it is a tale that Billy had previously told—Marty is ripping it off the story of Billy’s friend, and unjustifiably claiming it to be the work of his own imagination. Another attempted rendition of the same story by Marty this time to Hans, has Hans querying and correcting Marty’s narrative. Now, there is no single pursuant of the killer, it is the work of a grieving couple, Hans and Myra (Linda Bright Clay) and their daughter is mixed-race, and not white as in Marty’s account. Hans survives his own attempted suicide, and the cravat that he wears covers the wound. This is the second of the movie’s chilling moments based around this dress object: the first occurs when Hans offers the cravat to Charlie in a hospital waiting area, just after Charlie has killed Myra. Charlie’s expectation is that Hans will scream upon the discovery of Myra’s body and that grief will mark him out as his next victim. Freakishly, fearlessly, Hans demonstrates a degree of controlled rage that is even unsettling to a killer such as Charlie. The vigilante justice of the Vietnamese soldier, the righteousness of the serial killers going around killing serial killers, and the retributive justice at the core of the passivist protest of Hans and Myra suggest that justice requires both punishment and retribution, but also that vengeful justice can be futile, even when well-intended and not entirely “consequence-aware.” Philip French notes that “the stories are enacted on screen in the minds of Marty, Billy and Hans, recalling such films of the 1960s as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express and Agnès Varda’s Les créatures, where what we see are the books the central characters are writing, rewriting and tinkering with” (2012). If draft narrative compositions stoke initial impressions, it is the re-imagining of such work that takes one closer to the film’s overall intent. Hans re-writes the Vietnamese story, addressing what he calls the “VietCong conundrum”. If the prostitute was dumb in the first iteration, stating “Didn’t we have a war with you guys once or something,” (21:30) now as Hans tells it, the Vietnamese soldier while having sex with the prostitute, hears the line “Desist, brother. You know this will not help us” (96:33). The sex-worker is no longer dreary and listless, but has a degree from Yale, speaks Vietnamese and namedrops Noam Chomksy. Later as the Vietnamese soldier attempts to see through on the attack in the convention centre, in perfect Vietnamese she also encourages him to “Desist brother” (97:24). Hans envisages another change of scene: it is no longer Phoenix, but Saigon, circa 1963. The soldier is dressed in the orange robes of a Buddhist monk and throws the petrol over himself and self-immolates.

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For Hans, as he “finally manages to push the thoughts of anger and hate out of his gentle mind” (98:30), and while rejecting final pleas for him to “desist,” from his colleagues, he persists with an action that the monk believes “might” have significance. It is violent protest and a sacrificial act turned inward, echoing Fr Welsh and Ken’s actions and replicates Michal’s assertions of there being purpose and reward in the taking on of pain. Hans incorrectly sees the action as that of the first monk to protest the Vietnam War. His imaginings reference the iconic moment from 11 June 1963 when the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, according to James Verini, self-immolated, not as a protest against the Vietnam War as commonly thought, but against the persecution of Buddhists by the Catholic (and US-backed) Diem regime. Duc has since become the most famous self-immolater in history …. His fellow-monks and nuns saw to his fame, alerting the international media to the event beforehand, lying down below fire engines to prevent them from arriving at the scene, and distributing texts, translated into English, of Quang Duc’s final words. In November 1963, the Diem regime was overthrown, with the American government’s support for such a regime broadly criticised. (2012)

Malcolm Browne’s widely-circulated, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the incident brought it to worldwide attention. In contrast to the monk, Billy wants a chaotic and self-destructive ending, in the way the Kid wants it in Shooter. Billy is compelled to die not on behalf of others, but to get his life over with. Billy’s actions contrast not only with the monk in Hans’s story, but also with how Hans surrenders his own life to Costello’s men, inciting a shot that would warn Marty and Billy of Costello’s gang being in the vicinity. Equally, Myra is wonderfully measured and scornful of Costello when he approaches her in the hospital and does all she can to keep him away from Hans. Her resistance and denigration of Costello offers another expression of the idea of sacrifice and protection, as her focus is on preserving Hans’s life. In a scene after the credits start to run, Marty gets a call from Zachariah. In exchange for the telling of his story and help with his script, Marty had sworn that a message from Zachariah would be relayed to Maggie in his new film, a promise which has not been honoured. Marty has sworn on his life that he would do so. The conversation leads to Zachariah deciding to hold back on his revenge, setting the register of justice in terms of forgiveness and mercy, an unusual turn for a McDonagh work.

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Billy’s psychopathologically driven vigilantism, the Vietnamese soldiers revenge impulse, Zachariah’s reconsideration of revenge, the self-immolation that Hans re-imagines as a courageous, justice-inspired action, the self-sacrifice that Myra and Hans made all those years ago as they pursued the killer of their daughter plus Marty’s encounters with and configurations of such narratives blend to give a complex view on revenge, mercy and quests for justice more broadly. There is no template offered through which there is triumphant gain, without a cost. Billy exclaims to Hans: “You had to fuck him over by any means necessary” (56:30). So does the ends justify the means? Myra and Hans query the rightness of their pacifist protest, as they see the trauma that it brought to their lives. Was it worth it, Myra wonders?

A Very Very Very Dark Matter: Mutilation, Erased and Alternative Histories In Pillowman, Michal reminds Katurian of two gruesome stories that Katurian had written, “The Face off,” and “The Shakespeare Room.” In the latter, whenever Shakespeare, the canonical of canonical writers, wanted to create a new work, he would stab a pigmy woman that he held captive in a cage on his desk with a stick. He is prompting her with violence into the telling of her stories, and there is nothing by way of consent. Nicholas Hytner provides additional story details, noting how the woman withholds a play that she writes in her own blood on the walls of the cage. After she dies, the box goes up in flames, and with it the best play ever written (2017, Google books). Hytner remarks: “Maybe Shakespeare’s relationship with the pygmy is Martin’s relationship with his own imagination. Somewhere, smeared in blood on the inside, is the best play ever written. I hope he keeps trying to write it” (ibid.). In Pillowman Katurian is preoccupied with the notion that the first or only duty of a writer is to the story itself, and that stories should be sourced in the imagination, and have little to do with lived experience. However, the Katurian family situation does little to support that perspective as the horrors of Katurian and his brother’s lives haunt and engulf the tales that Katurian writes. The narrative tales that Michal signals invoke divisive academic arguments as to who wrote Shakespeare’s body of work, with many unwilling to attribute the full canon to a single author. There are also the accusations of racism, imperialism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, xenophobia and class objectivizations placed against

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Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare’s positioning/perspective on the figure of Caliban in The Tempest has incited extensive responses from ­post-colonial theatre makers and theorists. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s work is not alone in being co-opted as part of the colonial message, to reinforce the rank of British and other European cultures, intent on affirming the seeming inferiority of those colonised. The proposition that Shakespeare’s creativity was reliant on race and gender-related debasement, imprisonment and violation is McDonagh being intentionally provocative and this story fragment also raises fundamental questions about writing out of the stories of others, and how writing can be also connected to the circulation of systemic oppressions and inequalities. Exposed is not only the exploitative subsuming of the stories, philosophies and belief systems of other cultures, the things that imperialist ideology, literature and intercultural practices often stand accused, yet seem honour bound to reject. Objectivization and the exploitative co-optioning of difference signal the limits of liberal, enlightenment or humanist values that Western works tend to espouse. Most often, wealth, freedoms, privileges and rights invariably come at the expense of others. Despite narratives and discourses of the civilising projects of “white” European cultures, and despite sentimental reflections on the benigness of the encounter, the issues of exploitation cannot be displaced, marginalised or repressed. Common colonial practices include the misuse of human and material resources for financial gain, the imposing of values, belief systems and ideologies, slavery, the triggering of famines, and genocides. Acts of resistance to the colonial authority were invariably shut down with ruthless demonstrations of military might. The usurpation of African kingdoms/regions/tribes/communities by many European nations features in Dark Matter. When it comes to Dark Matter, anything Shakespeare can do, Hans Christen Andersen can do better. Andersen also holds a woman in a cage; while he does not rely on prodding with a stick to generate stories, there is cajoling, intimidation and the torture of his captive that is beneficial to her creative outputs to which he lays claim. Mbute Masakele is a Congolese pygmy woman, and she is the creative production line that spews out stories for Andersen from her 3-by-3 foot Mahogany box, with one glass side and two-inch sausage hole. As Marina Warner suggests, the scene echoes the “specimen” collections held by empire-builders and explorers, and the “infamous exhibition

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of Saara Baartman in London and Paris,” who was dubbed the “Hottentot Venus”, after her death, “her brain, organs and genitals were put on view in the Musée de l’Homme” (2018). Mbute has been named “Marjory” by Andersen because he is too lazy/unwilling to say her real name. Andersen exclaims: “… Too many ‘M’s and too many ‘B’s. ‘Mbubba bububbaba’. No. ‘Marjory’. I like ‘Marjory’. It’s kind of like an ugly English princess! ‘Is there any other kind?’ cry the chorus!” (DM, 10) (There are echoes here of the colonial power of naming/mis-naming that Brian Friel maps so well in Translations [1980].) Her stories are edited and whitewashed by Andersen: The “Little Mermaid” is black in Mbute/Marjory’s rendition, but altered by him to be white. To his self-deceiving mind at least, as editor, Andersen is a high-end contributor to a body of work that brings him great acclaim. Mpalive-Hangson Msiska notes how King Leopold II found the “Congo Free State,” as “a private colony publicly presented as a charitable and humanitarian project,” after the 1884 Berlin Conference of world powers, whereas the reality of it was that it was a “brutal, despotic regime that committed genocide, killing about 10 million people” through the Force Publique (2018). (Some scholars query these figures.) Notions to civilise and “Christianise” and to trade, clouded the expropriation of resources, especially ivory and rubber, “by any means, including the use of unfettered violence to force free labour”. From 1908 to 1960 the country was a Belgian colony, and “slave labour continued until the 1950s” (Msiska 2018). Mbute/Marjory is one such victim of colonial violence, but McDonagh has her time travelling back to the 1850s, before her birth in 1869; she is someone who is aware of the horrors that will be perpetrated by Belgian forces on her people, but also acknowledges that her own local leaders have been appalling in their own way. Dark Matter’s provocations around issues of race and exploitation are framed by hostility towards injustice that is partly expressed as political incorrectness, alongside dramaturgical and performance strategies designed to unnerve. Time, space and causality become plagued by chaos and incongruity; the play’s actions and debates intentionally lack logic or coherence. The play processes issues of colonisation and justice, freedom, fairness, retaliatory and justified violence in profound ways, while also interfacing justice and race specifically with issues of creativity, exploitation and disability. If the work is playful and disorientating, relying on

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sometimes tasteless taboo transgressions, and sets out its stall to incite offence, it is also savage and purposeful in its full-frontal attack on colonial exploitation. The work also mocks, mimics and points out parallel systems of exploitation, namely the literary, which is in this instance also gendered female; Andersen is not the only highly regarded figure reliant on a silent victim on the road to literary acclaim. Charles Dickens has enslaved Mbute/Marjory’s sister, Ogechi/Pamela, to the benefit of his work. Andersen’s attic contains toys and props that are plucked from the world of fairy tales more generally, which the script describes as: Various beautifully crafted but peculiar marionettes hang across the dark wooden walls, or are strewn across the dirty floor; puppets such as tarantulas, crabs, a scarecrow, a woodsman, as well as more ordinary animals such as a kitten, seahorses, pigeons, hummingbirds, etc., all very colourful. There’s also a large concertina hanging on the back wall. (DM, 3)

It is a space seemingly in alignment with Andersen’s creative instincts and is wonderfully designed by Anna Fleischle for the play’s premier. As the play opens, Mbute/Marjory’s captive presence is distinguishable in the darkness; she is a diminutive character, in a white dress, reliant on a crutch to move about. Easy, liberal humanist leaning, or left-of-centre viewpoints are likely to be confounded by this most unnerving and contentious of embodiments. Mbute/Marjory is small in stature because of her genetic make-up, but she has been disabled by Andersen who has hacked off her foot, the price she has to pay to gain some free time outside her cage/cell. This inhumane trade-off not only reflects gender and race inequalities, but the lob-sided power dynamics at the core of colonial/imperial “negotiations,” “encounters” or “exchanges.” A white, entitled and privileged male Dane exploiting the writings of a caged pigmy woman gives an outrageous and provocative edge to the dilemmas of justice. It is not just a literary issue, but a criminal one. To see this scenario as the essence of the play is to deny how the play riffs on that dilemma, taking issues of fairness and inequality and filtering them through nothing like a politically-correct or liberal-leaning equality perspective. An unseen narrator (Tom Waits’s recorded voice in the play’s premier) outlines Mbute/Marjory’s situation, circumstances and dilemma—die by her own hand, or maybe even write her way out of the situation?: “If you

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were a Congolese pygmy, imprisoned for sixteen years in a three-foot by three-foot mahogany box, with just some paper and a pencil for company … how would you go about hanging yourself”? (DM, 4). Although the narrator claims that she is one of the most “iconic writers” of her generation, apart from her sister, nobody may know of her existence. Gender and race invisibilities and erasures are purposefully signalled here. In the play’s premier Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles played Mbute/ Marjory with a mixture of defiance and contempt for her captor, with real assurance and optimism, and without any of the attendant psychological horrors one would expect from someone exploited and restrained in this way—no Stockholm Syndrome here. Again, it is a carnivalesque and Grand-Guignol sensibility that holds sway. The real-life Andersen had escaped poverty to achieve great literary acclaim during his lifetime; he was feted for his work, was attracted to men and women, and lived a peculiar and strange life. Andersen took inspiration from traditional ballad and folk cultures and both exploited and morphed these into something else. His stories have a worldwide audience even to this very day, and unlike more traditional fairy tales, Andersen’s ones rely less on the polarisation of good and evil that Bettelheim regards as of major importance in fairy tales and Andersen’s stories tend to shy away from the happy-ever-after type endings in favour of troubled, ambivalent or putative conclusions. Andersen’s tales, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Ugly Duckling,” and “The Little Mermaid” are variously referenced, as is “The Shadow,” “Red Shoes” and “Thumbelina.” “Gangly and peculiarly dressed” is how the script describes Andersen, and in performance a far fuller realisation is achieved (DM, 5). Jim Broadbent played Andersen as somewhat strange and odd, with a mix of buffoon, camp, and sinisterness in equal measure, relying less on intimidation and more on twisted logic to normalise his cruel actions towards his captive. As costumed and made-up, Broadbent looks more like a puppet than human. Couched in sly throwaway lines and sharp theatrical asides, the sadistic decision-making of Broadbent’s character is expertly related. Andersen is weakened by a tendency to ramble and to make reference to provocative ideas in his public appearances. While telling his story to children he notes how the Chinese eat children’s puppies, and children at time of want (DM, 6). The unfiltered nature and light relief of Andersen’s language and its sinister implications are as grotesque as they are profound. This writer is a fraud and a charlatan, somewhat trickster-like, but not quite in that

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territory of ambivalence and transgression. There is menace, even terror, in his machinations, even if simultaneously he is hyper-aware, self-ridiculing, and also seemingly oblivious to his reality; perhaps, colonialization in a nutshell, without the self-ridicule. There is great humour in Andersen’s response to the fan mail he receives from the King of Spain who disagrees with the sentiment in “The Emperor and his New Clothes,” and a letter from an Irish Maureen—who writes with a potato—that turns out not to be a begging letter, as he anticipates, but a request for a photo, which Andersen duly disobliges. Perhaps informed by James Cameron’s Terminator (1984–) series of films, two time-travelling dead Belgians (the red men), come back from the future with a plan to execute Mbute/Marjory, because in the future it will be she who will kill them, after they had killed her husband and children. The two ghost/soldiers first appear to Andersen as he reads publicly from his new work (my italics) “The Little Mermaid,” and the two soldiers also tip off the Press Man as to the fact that Andersen is not the story’s originator. Andersen goes to England to visit the household of Catherine and Charles Dickens, and overstays his welcome, a visit based on a real event. A gift from Dickens to Hans is a marionette made from the remains of Ogechi/Pamela, who is missing a foot and hand. Ogechi’s name means “Time Spirit” (DM, 54). Andersen wanted to believe that Dickens’s treatment of his captive matches his, but Ogechi/Pamela’s amputations happened before she got to England. Dickens had sex with his captive, Andersen does not. Dickens got a haunted concertina, from time-travelling gypsies at Christmas time, in exchange for Ogechi/Pamela’s hand and foot. Dickens gave the concertina to her, and it had a machine gun hidden inside (DM, 51). Hans also trades Mbute/Marjory’s foot for a concertina, and explains so sensitively: “Your little foot? I sold it to gypsies for a haunted concertina. Well, they said it was haunted. I’ve been too scared to play it!” (DM, 17) (Again there is evidence of both amputations and the trading in limbs, as in Spokane.) Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins outline the importance of canonical counter-discourse in post-colonial writing practices, especially the “dismantling of Shakespeare as a transcendental signifier for theatre practice and criticism alike” (20). Gilbert and Tompkins cite Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “epistemic violence” (251), indicating imperialism’s attack on “other cultures’ ways of knowing and

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representing themselves” (21). This counter-discourse imperative functions to destabilize “the power/knowledge axis of imperialism” (50). Andersen’s work is confronted as has been Shakespeare’s, to inflect it away from its transcendental significance, and counter-discursive strategies are afforded to Mbute/Marjory. During Andersen’s absence, Mbute/Marjory throws the food away (fourteen sausages) and goes on hunger strike. There is a “hummingbird interlude,” a song of protest, that is anti-army—dreamt up by a clubfooted Arabian beggar girl. The hummingbirds become a trained army to fight African oppressors. Mbute/Marjory also sings a song of reckoning for the ten million dead and is visited during a ghost sequence by Ogechi/Pamela playing a haunted concertina. After relaying a narrative about Chinese Siamese twins, Ogechi/Pamela exits the ghost sequence. Mbute/Marjory confounds her potential red men twin assassins with a story of Siamese triplets: “You must’ve lost him [another brother] in the time travel,” a provocation which is a reworking of her sister’s story (DM, 44). Barry: She thinks she can stop it ever happening. Dirk: That’s why she came back. Barry: She can’t stop it ever happening! It happened! Dirk: She’s clever, but she’s not that fucking clever! (DM, 21)

And if these two red men can point towards historic certainties, McDonagh’s justice provocation is imaginative and symbolic, undermining of such certainties. The script details her self-defence: With a gun hidden in her concertina, an insane deafening volley of gunfire that tears the Belgians to horrifying pieces, bloody squibs bursting out of them, Peckinpah-like in their awful death dance, arterial spray splattering the walls behind them. (DM, 52)

Mbute/Marjory is imaginatively set free on history; Andersen hands over to her the concertina and the two Webley guns, and wishes her well on her travels. The future is ten million deaths, but she swears that she won’t let it happen: “… Coupla hundred dead Belgians, then everybody shuts the fuck up and goes the fuck home”—mock and awe, perhaps (DM, 57).

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An upbeat, fantastical and inverted version of history is Mbute/ Marjory’s intervention. It is “self-help justice” at an extreme (Pinker, 99), take out a few hundred before it all kicks off, and the multi-million massacre will be avoided, clearly a consequence-aware perspective as Sen would like it to be. Distinctions between valid targets or collateral damage, are not considered important, all invaders are targeted in the same manner. If in Inishmore, Mairead’s dress has become smeared with some of the blood of those slain, here in Dark Matter, Mbute/Marjory smears the blood of the dead men all over her face, before lighting a Cuban cigar. Andersen’s comment: “Upbeat! More or less. (Pause.) Be good if she did it though, wouldn’t it”? is a provocative remark in the light of history, and in light of the way that he had treated her (DM, 60). As Mbute/ Marjory leaves, “Hans watches her go, her long shadow very slowly disappearing out of the doorway” (DM, 60), echoing aspects of Andersen’s story “The Shadow.” Harvey Young brings together three “interrelated activities”: “racial interpellation”—the “public identification” or “hailing” of the raced body, “racial socialisation,”—how race thinking is acquired through environmental experiences—, and “racial habitus”, which is “the development of a set of behaviours inspired by the experience of having been interpellated and socialized” (10). However, much Andersen attempts to impose his view, Mbute/Marjory rejects his “hailing”, his attempts to marginalise her, and his attempts for her to internalise the circumstances of her habitat, confinement and his modes of interaction and socialisation. In Mbute/Marjory’s fighting back, in her refusal to accept his terms and conditions of race, patriarchy (and imperialism indirectly) there is resistance, a contending of his violation and a refusal to see race inequalities as a matter of history. Cultural and literary memory are inconvenienced by the facts of history. McDonagh turns spectacle and objectivization into the spectacularly fantastic. History cannot be changed, and its legacy may not always need to be foregrounded in all its horror for awarenesses to emerge. McDonagh’s re-imagining of the slaughter of the Congolese is slight on the level of detail, but rich in terms of its ramifications, in terms of inequality, discrimination, literary and cultural exploitations, and most of all in terms of the intersectionality of race/gender hierarchies. Mbute/

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Marjory sets herself free from Andersen’s oppression, journeys to eek her own order and chaos on the world, no one is calling the shots but her. It is not only Belgian imperialism that is in the headlights so to speak, British and Danish colonial histories are also present. Closer to home Denmark colonised the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Iceland, and had overseas interests in India and Africa, the Caribbean from the early part of the seventeenth century, but at the time of the play setting, it was the empire-obsessed Britain that ruled the waves with colonies across Africa, Asia, Australia, the West Indies and Ireland. (As already discussed, unjust colonial occupation is targeted in Inishmaan by way of the game Helen gets Bartley to play.) Mbute/Marjory is both hostage and slave—working for nothing, a walk outside her cage costs her a leg, and her violated body bears the marks of colonial history and literary exploitation. Critics were divided on the play’s merits, some seeing it as a multi-layered interrogation of white privilege through manifold historical and fantastical lenses, while others saw it as misguided and not fully formed at best, and, at worst, for some it was a dud, a failure of the worst kind. Yet what unites the positive criticism is the notion of the play’s complex layering, the “pinballing” of ideas as Ian Shuttleworth put it (2018). Matt Trueman saw it as being “Part question-mark over artistic identity, part surreal metaphor for colonial guilt” (2018). For Fergus Morgan, the work lacks the “drum tight plotting” some critics associate with and expect from McDonagh’s writing (2018). Mainstream and commercial theatre seem to carry the expectation of cohesion and synthesis; the writer seems obliged to do the blending and managing of its various dramaturgical vectors, whereas McDonagh seems to be after something more elusive. Ideas and feelings are put out there, the follow-through is in the hands of the spectators. Synthesis is neither offered nor encouraged by McDonagh. Instead Dark Matter is a collage of images, ideas, outrageous observation, political incorrectness, elusiveness in the broadest meaning of its postmodern application. The in-joke about German theatre directors and their colonisation of scripts is one of many invitations that incites post-dramatic reading of a text and performance that blends Elizabethan roundelay, images that invoke a Goya-like tableau, fairy tale narratives with multiple fragmentary critiques of colonial histories. Mbute/Marjory’s are race and gender battles that speak particularly well to both Spokane and Billboards. In Roeg’s Don’t Look Now a female character small in stature is a psycho-killer, in Dark Matter, the woman small in stature is the kick-ass

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heroine, keen to fight, defend, and resist the injustices of colonisation. Her motives are genuine, without necessarily possessing either the means or the opportunity to do so. Unlike the motivation-obscure, or fragmentary motivation of colonial resistance that Padraic in Inishmore propagates, Marjory’s resistance has necessity, purpose and passion, without the attendant stupidity, illogicality and incoherence of values and motivations of the revolutionary INLA characters in Inishmore. Marjory is imaginatively unhindered by her gender, race, and physique; nothing stalls the grandeur of her certainty. It is optimism not tempered by history, but in the play’s imaginative licence, there is jouissance in the unleashing of the oppressed/ underdog fighting back, matching barbarism with barbarism. If McDonagh refuses to give validity to paramilitary violence in in Inishmore, in Dark Matter he does give such justification to Mbute/ Marjory, as a violence of last if not first resort. Mbute/Marjory reflects: “A day will come when there are no kings and there are no queens. People still won’t love each other quite as they ought to, it won’t solve everything, but at least there’ll be a few less c***s in the world we’re paying through the teeth for” (DM, 15), hopefully, but perhaps as unlikely as is the possibility of her success? Despite all of the horrors, McDonagh provocatively works towards an improbable, contentious, upbeat ending. Serving as Andersen’s ghost writer, Mbute/ Marjory offers tales that mark the ghosts and injustices of history with a vengeance.

Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri: Gendered and Endangered Justice Billboards (2017) was a relatively small budget film, of $12 million, but it was a huge critical and box office success story. Numerous awards followed; it incited some trenchant criticism in terms of how it dealt with the issue of race. Some have associated the film with the fatal shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old, African-American Michael Brown by white-American, police officer, Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on 9 August 2014 (an incident where claims of self-defence played against a shoot to kill strategy). Brown’s death prompted weeks of protest. Later in 2014 riots broke out after a St. Louis County Grand Jury investigation appeared to side with or could not disprove Wilson’s version of the incident and decided not to indict him. Protests were seen in 170 American cities. The follow-on Department of Justice enquiries

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found that the police force was guilty of many constitutional violations (Buchanan et al. 2015). It must be remembered that Billboards was first drafted in the early 2000s. In Billboards, seven months after Mildred Hayes’s (Frances McDormand) daughter, Angela (Kathryn Newton), had been abducted, raped as she was murdered, and then set alight, nobody as of yet has been brought to justice. A spectator does not get to witness Angela out walking alone on the road, there are no shots of her in fear and dread of some unknown stalking entity, no images of her fleeing to any real avail, no witness to her terror and screams during the final confrontation with her brutal predator(s). Angela’s sadistic assault, rape, her final breath, and the burning of her body are unrepresented. Neither does the spectator get the scene when the body is discovered, sight of a forensic team gathering evidence, nor the revelation of her death to her inconsolable family. The grim details of her murder are kept under wraps in her case file and the only visual clues to her assault is the burnt grass remaining at the crime scene and its lingering traumatic impact on her family. As outlined earlier in Chapter 1, most television series and films begin with a horrific assault not just to gain the spectator’s concentration and investment, but to ensure that the chase to track down the killer is one an audience will overwhelmingly champion. The grief of those left behind is regularly secondary or incidental to the challenges to track down the perpetrator, whose transparent and unambiguous actions are marked by extreme mental disturbance, sadism, psychopathology, evil and generally a lack of remorse. Acts of murder are seldom singular but multiple. There is a visible victim (regularly a child or a teenager) and a perpetrator, whose presence is invariably signalled, even if his/her identity is not clearly shown. Billboards disavows most of the generic conventionality mentioned here. Seven months on from the killing of her daughter, a bereft, exacerbated mother cannot accept that the local police force have done enough to investigate the crime. The killing has devastated Mildred and her surviving child, Robbie (Lucas Hedges), and ex-husband, (another) Charlie (John Hawkes), ex-cop, and wife beater. To keep the case in the public arena, Mildred Hayes is inspired to hire three billboards outside her local town, on a not so busy highway, Drinkwater Road, onto which she indicts the failures of local policing to uphold the law. Thomas Moore’s Irish song “The Last Rose of Summer,” sung by Renée Fleming, is used at the point of inspiration and is utilised again when Mildred later turns to arson.

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Mildred ensures that what is displayed on the three billboards contains nothing libellous and nothing defamatory, cross-checking with the local advertising agent, Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones); she wants to remain within the limits of the law. “Raped while dying” “And still no arrests?” “How come, Chief Willoughby?” (7:00)

The billboards were prompted by McDonagh’s travels through Georgia, where he saw similar types of billboards used in protest, and he was fascinated by the rage and despair that drove people to remonstrate in this way. The billboards are red with black ink lettering and a black frame backdrop, colours that symbolically signal her call to justice. Mildred scrapes together the money to have the billboards installed. The regional television station is enticed by the novel situation and broadcasts from the protest site. The local police force is led up by Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), and two of his more visible associates Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) and Desk Sergeant Cedric Connolly (Željko Ivanek). Willoughby admits that the majority of his officers are racist, and of those who are not, they are homophobic. It is probably easy to assume that there would be resistance to her protest within the police force, but what is not so easily anticipated is the level of opposition from the local community itself. This is not the anti-police community, like we find in the Leenane Trilogy, it is one behind its own officers—suggesting a degree of collusion and alignment with and validation of racist and homophobic behaviours. The local dentist, Fat Geoffrey (Jerry Winsett), uses a consultation to let Mildred know what he and others think of her stance. He attempts to treat tooth decay without a painkilling injection, Novocaine, and when he reluctantly gives it to her, he does so roughly, and then does not wait for the painkilling effect to kick in. As he tries to extract the tooth forcefully, Mildred takes the dental drill to his fingernail, and pierces it, an action for which there is an attempt to charge her with assault. Geoffrey is the provocateur, but Mildred is no push over; she will not give him free reign to cause her pain. Mildred’s response pushes her just outside the parameters of self-defence, her wounding of him seems like an unnecessary, supplementary violence. School-going teenagers intimidate

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Robbie and later, one fires a can of soft drink at her car, for which she takes retribution, not discriminating between the thrower and his gang, and not on the basis of gender. A visit from the local priest, Fr Montgomery (Nick Searcy) is also driven by the need to pacify her. He tells her that the community is fully supportive of her grief, but that her protest is insensitive, inappropriate and distasteful. Her retort is to indict the church for its inability to meet the demands of justice in cases of clerical sexual abuse, but not only that, she confronts church ministers as a collective for remaining silent throughout decades (and most likely centuries) of sexual assault. She accuses them all by way of association, referencing The California Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act of 1988, enacted to deal with members of street gangs, including the Crips and the Bloods. (Of course it echoes Irish [Offences against the State Act] and British law [Anti-Terrorism legislation] prohibiting membership of unlawful or proscribed organisations.) The Californian law deals with the substantive crime of gang membership. Mildred has the substance of that law correct, but it is a bit more nuanced than Mildred suggests on the nature of active gang participation. According to the First District Appellate Project, “the offense of Active-participation has three components”: “When the defendant participated in the gang, he/she knew that members of the gang engage in, or have engaged in, a pattern of criminal gang activity. Or the defendant wilfully assisted, furthered, or promoted a felony by members of the gang by directly and actively committing a felony; or aiding and abetting a felony” (First District Appellate Project). As for the clergy, they are members of a club, have the colours (uniform), rules, and their secrets, so priests like Fr Montgomery have effectively joined a gang. Mildred holds the priest culpable for child clerical abuse by way of allegiance, wilful assistance and active non-intervention. Consequently, Fr Montgomery has forfeited the right to comment on her situation. (Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland deemed anyone associated with crown forces, even suppliers of goods and services, and civil servants to be guilty by association, and consequently valid targets. In contrast, there is the Nuremburg defence, where those lower down the chain of command are deemed less responsible for crimes against humanity committed by Nazis.) Officer Dixon is the first to discover the billboards and disturbs Willoughby with a phone call during his family’s Easter Sunday meal. Willoughby stops Dixon from beating Welby, when Red would not help

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in getting the billboards taken down. Dixon has a reputation for assaulting black people in custody. In Willoughby’s comments: “There was no … real evidence to support that;” his hesitation is the giveaway (11:47). Dixon joins that long list of violent and illegal interrogators to feature in McDonagh’s work. Willoughby does not take kindly to the billboards and puts pressure on Red to end the billboard’s protest. Then Willoughby attempts to dissuade Mildred, by threatening to bankrupt her by taking her through the court system, and he even uses his illness as a bargaining chip. Willoughby dispassionately outlines and not just claims that he has done his best with the case, but in the absence of evidence, information, and witnesses, he has unhappily exhausted all lines of investigation. As DNA samples taken from the crime scene have not matched anyone on a national database, Mildred proposes to Willoughby that every male in the locality, state, country and the world should have a DNA sample taken upon birth, so that the database can be used to cross-check for evidence secured from crime scenes and “make 100% certain,” and penalise accordingly (14:55). Such a sample taking goes against principles for fairness, freedoms and due process assumed sacrosanct to democratic legal processes. Mildred does not care about apparent civil-rights violations, but does get behind the notion of absolute proof. Tragedy and trauma incite proposals that request the breach of constitutionally granted rights and liberties. Her cruel response to his revelation of his pancreatic cancer, leaves Willoughby surprised and distressed by her hardness. “Not as effective after you croak,” is her conversation ending remark, even if she does display some semblance of guilt as he leaves in silence (15:57). If the lines “Well, he’s the head of ‘em, ain’t he? The buck’s gotta stop at somebody, don’t it?” (13:10), provide one perspective on Mildred, two other moments reveal something different to this anti-empathetic disposition: her upturning of the incapacitated beetle lying on its back on the windowsill of Red’s office, and during a later moment when Willoughby coughs up blood. The way that McDormand states “I know baby,” makes her empathy and compassion perfectly clear (30:05). Willoughby kills himself not to avoid the experience of his own slow demise and the pain that will accrue, but to protect his wife and family and to leave them with more optimistic memories. Anything but hyper-masculine, the ill Willoughby is desiring, playful, thoughtful,

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and ironic. In the letters he leaves behind there is great poignancy in his note to his wife, Anne (Abbie Cornish), the message to Dixon is simple: “through love comes calm” (67:41), and to Mildred he reminds her that he believes that he has done his best. There is nothing like the self-delusion that Fr Welsh possesses in Lonesome in the taking of his own life. As a result of Dixon’s physical assault of Red and his colleague Pamela (Kerry Condon), he is asked to surrender his gun and badge to the newly appointed African-American Chief Officer Abercrombie (Clarke Peters). Dixon can no longer exist as if he has immunity from all that he does. Mildred sees the burning down of her billboards as a police initiative, in retaliation for Willoughby’s death. As part of her tit-for-tat, vengeance driven justice strategy, Mildred petrol bombs the police station, not realising that Dixon is inside. Arson as a female form of retaliation and self-protection has long been mythologised. Mildred moves from the position of grieving mother and tragic victim to one of vigilante perpetrator, leaving behind the legitimacy of protest for something else. James (Peter Dinklage) provides Mildred with a false alibi. Legal intention can be both direct and oblique, the former suggesting a clear intent to bring about a particular result, the latter occurs when “the defendant acted intentionally, but brought about a result that he did not specifically desire” (Hanly, 212). However, intention to cause serious harm to a person is sufficient for a murder conviction (ibid., 212). Similar actions to Mildred’s carried out on a private home that was known to be occupied or a public building populated by workers would have her guilty of endangering life. Mildred endangers, without intent. She has assessed the risk, and reasonably assumes that a call to the station would always be answered if there was someone present; she wants to damage property and not a person. Mildred could not reasonably anticipate that Dixon would be wearing headphones; according to the law she is guilty of damage by the act of arson, but not of the burning of his body, action and thought are not aligned. (Arson in England and Wales has been “abolished by the Criminal Damage Act 1971 but is retained to describe the situation where offences under s.1 are committed by means of fire” [Read and Fitzpatrick, 541]). The lengths she goes to avoid casualties, and the fact that she stops on seeing Dixon is indicative of her intent, but the matter is complicated by the fact that she does not go to Dixon’s rescue. Now unemployed and recovering from his burns, Dixon overhears a conversation in a pub boasting of gang rape and it puts him on the

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track of an unnamed figure, Crop-Haired Guy (Brendan Sexton III, who played the serial-killing Young Zachariah in Psychopaths). “Once the gasoline kicked in she was hot” is his callous and sinister response to a question about a woman allegedly raped (85:54). He becomes a suspect by way of details provided, by way of his sinister disposition, and by way of his concerns that he might have been overheard. In Hangmen, Mooney’s admissions of culpability do not make him guilty, and in Billboards, crude and tasteless as his comments are, they cannot be a determinant of guilt. The sample of DNA that Dixon cleverly acquires by scraping the suspect’s face fails to link him to Angela’s killing. The suspect was out of the country when the deed took place, unless there is some military conspiracy/cover-up to offer him a false alibi. Dixon is still convinced that he is guilty of rape. What gives him such certainty? Mildred never gets to link Dixon’s suspect to the figure who intimidated her in the gift shop. A conspiratorial conversation laden with subtext between Mildred and Dixon results in them setting out on at least a day’s drive to Idaho. Dixon and Mildred are committed to using a lengthy road trip to reflect on their potential vigilante action, unlike Psychopaths’s Zachariah and Maggie, whose killings of horrific serial killers are driven by almost iron will and absolute certainty of rightness. Mildred and Dixon’s possible vigilante justice will not be in relation to any specific crime committed, but for unspecified crimes, generic culpability based on Dixon’s instincts about a nasty, violent and disturbing character. Mildred has complex relationships with Robbie, with Charlie, with the priest and dentist, Willoughby, Red, Dixon and James; she is not marginalised and not there to serve a homosocial narrative, but it is about her relationship to patriarchy. Her connection with Denise (Amanda Warren) is a mutually supportive and motivating one. McDormand’s character has to process a considerable range of emotions, rage and hurt, bewilderment, defiance, despair, a steely conviction that someone should pay. Robbie is tired of Mildred’s obsession with Angela’s murder, is neglected by her grief-focus, and is less able to cope himself. Going to work and to war, Mildred wears a denim coloured jumpsuit (boiler-suit) with the sleeves rolled up, a light blue/occasionally red blouse, and grey bandana with black and white dots. The colour combination partly mimics those of the American flag, but the bandana features polka dots and not stars. In work Mildred wears a half-length pink duster coat over the jumpsuit and even on a date with James she is in her jumpsuit, with beige top. It is also intentionally the dress code of the working

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classes, rather than necessarily a signalling only of her h ­ yper-masculinisation as Ferguson (2019) reads it. A signalling of her rage as feminine and her actions as masculine is, in part, it could be argued as a way of avoiding the issue of female-gendered rage/violence that operates outside of the symbolic realm. McDonagh’s work is comfortable in equating the feminine with such vigilante actions. After all, in Psychopaths Myra partakes in pacifist vigilante justice alongside Hans, and Maggie and Zachariah are vigilante killers; neither of these female characters needs to be perceived from a viewpoint of hyper-masculinisation, or from the perspective of hyper-feminisation. The same applies to Dark Matter’s Mbute/Marjory. Initially Mildred refuses a tragic passivity and uses her anger to inform her radical protest. Earlier, Mildred’s remarks to the charges Denis wants her to face set out the dilemma of justice, in a film that has little by way of witnesses or incriminating evidence: “Jeez, then I guess it’s just his word against mine, huh? Kinda like in all those rape cases you hear about. Except, in this case, the chick ain’t losing” (27:54). Hers is a laudable and somewhat contentious position, as is her desire to “crucify the motherfuckers” (71:43). Her empowerment is evident, but in having identified the wrong (invalid) target (police officers) means that she, at least, has been touched by the uncertainty that none of the INLA paramilitary characters in Inishmore seems to grasp. Mildred’s desire for justice, any justice, takes her to an extreme. Indeed, is the soldier the scapegoat of last resort, because justice cannot find a way forward, and if so, then we are back to the real-life scapegoating of groups like the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four by police officers desperate to hold someone to account for atrocities? Are audiences faced not so much with police scapegoating, but with victim scapegoating, with the harming of an as yet innocent man, no matter how despicable his views on women happen to be, no matter how creepy he appears in his encounter with Mildred in the gift shop? Where is the legal due process and rights protections audiences might have wanted for the endearing, if sometimes irritating Katurian, or for the provocative, menacing Mooney? Hangmen’s Mooney is a pathological trickster, a fundamental perverter of agency, but how do we think about his freedoms, rights, and opportunities. After all, comments made by him to Syd are not made under legal caution. How different is this final image of the armed Dixon and Mildred sharing a car journey, from the targeting of Mick by Thomas based on suspicions in Skull, Billy’s vigilante-styled targeting of criminals in Psychopaths, the kangaroo courts of Inishmore and the lynch mob

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activities of Hangmen? Are there some actions audiences might be more comfortable with than others? Why such presumptions of guilt? Does Mildred ever lose the goodwill of the viewer? And if not, what would she have to do to lose that? Despite the precarity of justice and the potential of a miscarriage of justice, the justice imperative in Billboards is prompted by trauma and loss, but distorted by the film’s black humour throughout, especially when the film’s genre imperatives are confounded, and audiences are deprived of the resolution normally associated with films based around criminal investigation. The accusations that the film somehow transforms Dixon from villain to hero, without leaving him answerable to the charges of racism needs some consideration. Is it a sleight-of-hand devaluation of Dixon’s vile qualities and an endowment of him with an unearned humanity? Indeed, some critical opprobrium lost the run of itself in its disapproval of any of the acting awards that Sam Rockwell earned for his role, based on the assumption that the awards were somehow tacit and underhand approval for the racist inclinations of the character. To believe that the receipt of an award for the playing of a racist character is a invariably a reinforcement of racism is a frightening proposition to me, troubling because it is so way off the mark, but also indicative of the ways that outrage increasingly functions across social platforms, in defiance of logic and fairness. The arguments that in the film race issues are marginalised, who is telling the story of the mother of the tortured African-American, or that racism is only experienced through the lens of whiteness need reviewing. Ira Madison III notes “Whether it be through malice or ignorance, McDonagh’s attempts to script the black experience in America are often fumbling and backward and full of outdated tropes” (2017). And Marc Bernardin argues that “excuses are employed to give him [Dixon] a redemptive, almost heroic arc,” adding, in Billboards “pain equals purification. We are asked to forgive Dixon his trespasses because he suffered, not because he reckoned with his own past actions and asked for forgiveness himself. He is never punished, he is tested” (2018). (See Sommerlad’s rejection of this accusation [2018].) The marginalisation of race is not the same as signalling inferiority. Dixon and his mother are obviously vilely racist, it is a town reliant on racist thought and collusion; Mildred is not free from racism. To the television interviewer Mildred remarks that the police are too “busy goin’

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round torturing black folks to be bothered doing anything about solving actual crime” (12:48). Such torture is an obvious crime, but in establishing a hierarchy of justice and need, she is partly affirming her own white privilege and unconscious racism through self-prioritisation, even if what accrues to her as being white is not terribly advantageous. We can accept a differential between murder and torture, but the way that she uses the word “actual” ensures we cannot easily distinguish between her ruthlessness and incitement, whether what she says represents her views or whether it is merely a provocation. (Dividends of whiteness are very limited, seen in the conditions under which Dixon lives with his overpowering mother.) African-American Abercrombie is the one who acts decisively and is someone who contends with the racism in the police department. It is Denise, Jerome (Darrell Britt-Gibson) and James who assist Mildred in the re-installing of the billboards. Yes, all three are secondary characters, but all are complicatedly and compassionately connected to Mildred. She is the central figure, and there is no need to apologise for that. Denise’s remark: “You go, girl! You go fuck those cops up!” is a response to inequality and racism, yet it may incite an “Appalling Vista” as any other miscarriage of retribution (10:17). In one way, race is marginalised, in another what is foregrounded is the hegemonic and systematic racism of the film’s imagined community. Additionally, race marginality must also be viewed intertextually and side by side with other work, in the way that Dark Matter foregrounds race objectivization and counters it or Spokane, as I argue, does likewise. Not everyone would share that view either, and some almost libellous (to my mind) on-line reviews of Dark Matter state as much. On the one hand, Mildred initially ensures that there is nothing libellous, rude or defamatory about the billboards, that she is to the letter of the law, and, on the other, the police threaten to use the law against her, that she will be priced out of justice. Red, under duress from the police, uses contract law to suggest that she has only paid a deposit and that another payment is due, hoping that Mildred has not enough money to make the next installment. The justice system itself is prejudiced against her in terms of victimhood, gender and class. If civil justice is not an ally but a hindrance, Mildred turns from passive protest to vigilantism. Whatever justifications and allowances are made for Mildred’s protests, McDonagh balances them with a compassion for the law officer who does all he can, who is haunted by the failure to arrest and charge

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someone, who wants to but cannot control his unruly troupe. Yet, a flawed Willoughby is not entirely the pragmatic or benign face of justice, given his treat to tie Mildred up in court, his tolerance of Dixon’s violence and racism, and optimism about Dixon’s maturation—even in tolerance and compassion there are current and consequential injustices. If in Pillowman it was the “child’s side” that Ariel prioritises and here initially in Billboards, it is “the mother’s side,” that is to the fore, and while Mildred does her best to shape Willoughby as the enemy, he does not acquire that status. The forces of the law are compromised in Billboards, but differently to other works thus far by McDonagh. Willoughby worries for Mildred. “I hope they do not kill you,” in that he means the community in its totality (66:10). That may well be his awareness of the hostility circulating, the collective, communal, lynchmob mentality and proximity to the ideological licencing of such actions by the state that reveals the perilous and frightening cost of her pursuit of justice. That said, it is Abercrombie’s countering comment: “We ain’t all the enemy, y’know,” that serves as a riposte to the dangerous and relatively communally isolated situation in which Mildred finds herself, and signals a different way of doing things (70:10). Essentially, which characters are the allies and enemies of “by the book” justice? Mahatma Ghandhi’s caution of an “eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” ethos discussed by Hans, Billy and Marty in Psychopaths stands over each of these plays and films in this chapter. Armed resistance, self-defence, retaliation, and fighting back complicate the issue of retributive and consequential justice. Mark Kermode notes of Billboards: “Whether each of these characters is on a road to redemption or ruin is left open-ended” (2018). And for Therese Jones and Les Friedman “The simple platitude of a bookmark shared by Mildred’s ex-husband’s 19-year-old girlfriend (Penelope), “All this anger begets greater anger,” recalls the transformative conclusion of Sophocles’s Orestia in which the righteous vengeance of the Furies, justice through retaliation, is replaced with justice through the law” (61). In Spokane, Carmichael is a delusional victim/perpetrator, Mervyn is inclined to be a perpetrator/fanciful hero and, scam-artists, Toby and Marilyn, all too easily lay claims on victimhood. When the circumstances are a sectarian, unequal pre-Peace Process, Northern Ireland, and its historic contexts of imperialism, Inishmore’s Padraic sees himself and republicanism as a victim of power and history. That way all his behaviours are licensed as a resistance of subjugation and his paramilitary rationale

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is steadfast, but the spectator is invited to see it is as a far from coherent, justified or bullet-proof ideology. McDonagh goes out of his way to slight Padraic’s sense of victimisation and republicanism’s eulogization of the freedom fighters in ballads and funerary practices. The ideological inconsistency of the INLA characters suggests something à la carte, claims on justice as a convenience. What unravels when someone like Inishmore’s Padraic, driven by actual and misperceived historic injustices, claims to be turning to violence as a last resort, whereas the truer reality is that his is violence of almost first resort? With militant republicanism, it is easy to think outside the justice box, when there is no real box. In Billboards Mildred’s slippage from being seen as a victim of circumstance with the intention of legitimate and rights-based actions to becoming an arsonist and possible vigilante raises all kinds of complications. Across all the works in this chapter, there is a sense of murdered children and despoiled bodies, Myra and Hans’s daughter, Angela, those bodily violations and illegal imprisonments of Mbute/Marjory and Ogechi/Pamela, even the damaged, teenage Carmichael. In Billboards, the violators are not made visible, even if the horrors of their actions are foregrounded, and instead, what circulates is the objective violence, the dark matter of violence that shapes communities (Žižek, 1–3). How such embodiments of violation interface with issues of guilt/innocence, perpetrator/victim, punishment/reward to complicate expressions of and encounters with justice will be the focus of the final chapter.

Works Cited BBC News. 1998. “Murder in the Name of War—Mỹ Lai.” 20 July 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/64344.stm. Bernardin, Marc. 2018. “Despite Its Awards, Three Billboards Is a Shallow Look at Race in Rural America.” The Guardian, 9 January 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/09/three-billboards-goldenglobes-awards-race-rural-america. Buchanan, Larry, Ford Fessenden, et al. 2015. “What Happened in Ferguson?” New York Times, 10 August 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-under-siege-after-police-shooting.html. Cahill, Maria. 2017. “I Once Knew Him as Martin and I Later Depersonalised to McGuinness After My Own Hurt Got in the Way.” Irish Independent, 23 March 2017. http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/maria-cahill-ionce-knew-him-as-martin-and-i-later-depersonalised-to-mcguinness-after-myown-hurt-got-in-the-way-35560426.html.

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CAIN Web Service. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/chron/ch75.htm. Chambers, Robert. 2018. “Martin McDonagh, interviewed by an In Bruges obsessive.” GQ Magazine, 12 January. https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/ article/martin-mcdonagh-interview. Dargis, Manohla. 2017. “Review: On Violence and the Pain of Others in ‘Three Billboards’.” New York Times, 8 November. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/11/08/movies/review-three-billboards-outside-ebbing-missouri-martin-mcdonagh.html?referrer=google_kp. Deane, Seamus. 1985. “Civilians and Barbarians: Field Day Pamphlet No. 3. Rpt. in Ireland’s Field Day.” Derry: Field Day Theatre. Ferguson, Molly E. 2019. “‘I Retract That Bit…’: Hypermasculinity and Violence in Martin McDonagh’s Films’.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 30 (1): 25–43. First District Appellate Project. https://sites.google.com/site/fdapwiki/ main_page/gangs/substantive-gang-offense. French, Philip. 2012. “Review-Seven Psychopaths.” The Guardian, 12 December 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/09/seven-psychopathsreview-french-mcdonagh. Gilbert, Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. 1996. Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London: Routledge. Hanly, Conor. 2006. An Introduction to Irish Criminal Law, 2nd ed. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Hytner, Nicholas, 2017. Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre. https:// books.google.ie/books?id=GWDJDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT83&lpg=PT83&dq=Nicholas+Hytner+the+shakespeare+room+Martin+mcdonagh&source= bl&ots=LrbCrHVEHU&sig=ACfU3U3-E0Z7joTaAePjiKyCXAnnLIooJQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj8jPnEmdPiAhXzoXEKHf9OBXw4ChDoATAEegQIBxAB#v=onepage&q=Nicholas%20Hytner%20the%20 shakespeare%20room%20Martin%20mcdonagh&f=false. Jones, Therese, and Les Friedman. 2018. “Grief Observed: Manchester by the Sea and Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri.” The Pharos, Spring, 58–61. http://alphaomegaalpha.org/pharos/2018/Spring/2018-2-Medicine.pdf. Jordan, Eamonn. 2009. “Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore: Commemoration and Dismemberment Through Farce.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 15 (2): 269–286. Jordan, Eamonn. 2012. “A Grand-Guignol Legacy: Martin McDonagh’s A Behanding in Spokane.” Irish Studies Review 20 (4): 447–461. Kermode, Mark, 2018. “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Review—A Search for Justice Writ Large.” The Guardian, 14 January. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/14/three-billboardsoutside-ebbing-missouri-review-frances-mcdormand. Luckhurst, Mary. 2004. “Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of Inishmore: Selling (-Out) to the English.” Contemporary Theatre Review 14 (4): 34–41.

116  E. JORDAN Madison III Ira. 2017. “Tone-Deaf ‘Three Billboards’ Tries Absolving White People of Racism: And Oscars Season Loves It.” Daily Beast, 14 December. https://www.thedailybeast.com/tone-deaf-three-billboards-tries-absolvingwhite-people-of-racism-and-oscars-season-loves-it. McDonald, Henry. 2008. “The Guardian Profile: Martin McDonagh.” The Guardian, 25 April. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/apr/25/theatre.northernireland. Morgan, Fergus, 2018. “Review, A Very Very Very Dark Matter.” The Stage, 25 October. https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2018/martin-mcdonagh-avery-very-very-dark-matter-at-Bridge-theatre-london-review-round-up/? l o g i n _ t o   =   h t t p s % 3 A % 2 F % 2 F w w w. t h e s t a g e . c o . u k % 2 Faccounts%2Fusers%2Fsign_up.popup. Msiska, Mpalive-Hangson. 2018. “The Unfree Free State: An Overview of the History of the Congo.” Program Note, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre. O’Hagan, Sean. 2001. “The Wild West.” The Guardian, 24 March. https:// www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/mar/24/weekend.seanohagan. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity. London: Penguin Books. Ramachandran, V.S. 2011. The Tell-Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature. London: William Heinemann. Ramachandran, V.S., and Paul McGeoch. 2007. “Can Vestibular Caloric Stimulation Be Used to Treat Apotemnophilia?” Medical Hypotheses 69 (2): 250–252. Read, Alan, and Ben Fitzpatrick. 2006. Criminal Law, 3rd ed. London: Sweet & Maxwell. Sandel, Michael J. 2009. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sen, Amartya. 2010. The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin. Shuttleworth, Ian. 2018. “Martin McDonagh’s A Very Very Very Dark Matter Is a Magnificent Wild Card of a Show.” Financial Times, 25 October. https:// www.ft.com/content/1da05bd0-d83a-11e8-ab8e-6be0dcf18713. Sommerlad, Joe. 2018. “Billboards Is Not a Racist Film: What’s Truly ‘Problematic’ Is Twitter’s Appetite for Controversy.” The Independent, 27 January 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/three-buildings-outside-ebbing-missouri-racism-row-twitter-martin-mcdonagh-oscars-frances-mcdormand-a8178861.html. Spivak, Gayatri. 1985. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 243–61. Trueman, Matt, 2018. “Martin McDonagh’s ‘A Very Very Very Dark Matter.’” Variety, 25 October 2018. https://variety.com/2018/legit/reviews/ very-very-very-dark-matter-review-martin-mcdonagh-1202993998/.

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Utichi, Joe. 2012. “It’s a Mad, Mad World.” The Sunday Times, 9 December 2012, pp. 16–17. Verini, James. 2012. “A Terrible Act of Reason: When Did Self-Immolation Become the Paramount Form of Protest.” New Yorker, 16 May 2012. http:// www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/05/history-of-self-immolation.html. Warner, Marina. (2018). “By the Virtue of the Dark.” Program Note, A Very Very Very Dark Matter. Bridge Theatre. Young, Harvey, 2013. Theatre and Race. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

CHAPTER 5

The Whole of Nothing

Abstract  The essence of the previous chapters is about the challenges and difficulties in both the administration of criminal justice, and what crimes oblige characters to experience and how they respond. Because criminal justice, as both protection and enforcement, is so vulnerable, inconsistent and uncertain, it is the work of Julia Kristeva on abjection, with its emphasis on fluidity, boundary violation and precarity that serves to enhance my argument further. McDonagh emphasises the significance of violated bodies, deploys language practices that give expression to the crude and almost unsayable, dramatizes failed suicides in incongruous ways, and uses the symbolism associated with fire and burning. Notions of abject justice are conflated with abject laughter. Consequently, McDonagh’s interrogations of criminality and corruption stress the absolute centrality of justice to contemporary life. Keywords  Abjection · Violated bodies · Staging the grotesque · Burning · Grotesque suicides · Uncertain rewards · Abject laughter

Introduction Thus far, I have pursued various characterisations, incidents and scenarios in relation to criminal justice, including, victim violation, state incompetence, corrupt officialdom, miscarriages of justice. I have also considered the extra-judicial reliance on “self-help”, self-defence, revenge, © The Author(s) 2019 E. Jordan, Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30453-9_5

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lynch-mob and vigilante justice. If in the criminal justice system there is recurring failure to afford the presumption of innocence and the inability and unwillingness to establish truth beyond reasonable doubt, those that operate outside the law take such principles and grotesquely distort them. In McDonagh’s writing there is a disinclination to enforce a duality of victim/perpetrator, guilt/innocence, as well as uncertainty about justice being done or seen to be done. The wholesale precarity of justice is fundamental to the conflicts in both the plays and films. The list below summarises the complicating factors that I have variously identified thus far: CRIME INVESTIGATION & DETECTION • Visibility/Invisibility of State • State Protects/Fails to Protect • State Vigilance/Absence • Law Abiding/Lawless Communities • Crimes Attempted/Failed Outcomes • Accidental/Calculated Acts • Rationality, Reason, Foresight/Impulsivity • Free Will/Defect of Reason • Passion/Cold Blood • Self-Defence/Pre-Emptive Strike • Reasonable/Unreasonable Force • Provocation/Unjustified and Disproportionate Response • Foresight/Intent/Unintended Consequences • Justified/Unjustified Actions • Total Liability/Negligent and Reckless • Fully Accountability (Sane)/Diminished Capacity (Insanity) • Retribution as Last Resort/First Resort • Remorse/Regret-free Actions • Investigative Integrity/Fecklessness • Earnest/Rogue Agents of State • Competence/Incompetence of Investigative Approach • Due Process Followed/Abandoned • Hearsay/Circumstantial/Affirmed Evidence • Facts Established/Conjectured • Verified/Tampered Evidence • Alibi/False Alibi • Reliable/Unreliable Witnesses • Allegations/False Accusations

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• Free/Coerced Admissions • False/Unreliable Confessions • Sanctity of Life/Collateral Damage • Civic Cooperation/Omerta and Collusion • Before/Beyond the Law • Wrong/Right Indistinguishable • Victim/Perpetrator/Antagonist/Protagonist PERVERSE PROSECUTIONS & INCONGRUOUS PUNISHMENTS • State as Benign and Protective/Malign Foundation or Occupation • Legitimate/Illegitimate Personal or Collective Actions • Perceived Necessity/Supervening circumstances • Victim Vindication/Criminal Impunity • Victims Abandoned by the Law/Criminals calling on the Law • Absence of Trials/Mock Trials • Presumptions of Guilt/Innocence • Beyond Reasonable Doubt/Absence of Appropriate Proof • Punishment Enforced/Second Chances • Executions/Exonerations • Consequence-Aware/Consequence-Blind Justice • With/Without Recourse to Appeal EXTRA-JUDICIAL PROTESTATIONS & CONTESTATIONS • Laws/Self-made “Laws” • Signalling Proponents/Enemies of Justice • Self-Legitimisation/Communal Legitimisation • Righteous/Perverse Protestations • “Self-Help”/Vigilante or Lynch-mob Justice • Self-Declared/Self-Entitled Victimhood • Justice Inequalities/Privilege Feigning Victimhood • Matters of Honour/Unprincipled Principles • “The Child’s Side”/“Save the next little Boy” • Punishments Deserved (Comeuppance) or Blood Lust • Mercy/Justice • Unifocal/Comparative Systems of Justice • The Right/Wrong Thing to Do • Duty and Virtue/Common Bad • Sound/Miscarriages of Justice

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The above list suggests not only a series of oppositions, contrasts, and their interfacings, which are then compounded by the issue of laughter, incongruity and taboo violations in relation to the following five factors: 1. The presence and significance of gore and variously violated bodies 2. The reliance on the burning of objects or people, as something that destabilises, destroys and renews 3.  The significance of grotesque/harrowing attempted/successful suicides in relation to sacrifice 4. The pattern of compounding/withdrawing of insults, stereotyping, and politically incorrect comments and attitudes of various characters 5. Genre inconsistency and the failure to apply concepts of natural or poetic justice and how genre rewards/punishes. It is Julia Kristeva’s reflections on the Abject that I now rely on to further explain the machinations of McDonagh’s writing practices, and how justice is distorted when framed as an expression of and engagement with the Abject.

Abject Conditions Across the Leenane Trilogy the phrase “Against God” is expressed by a range of characters, and it can mean anything from an unforgivable transgression to a minor misdemeanour. While the moral term is both a call to a fundamental principle of order, obligation and duty, yet it is evident that the concept is unfixed, ungrounded, arbitrary, and often overused to the point of worthlessness. In Bruges, Harry gives emphasis to “A matter of honour” (64:25) and he states that he has to abide by “his principles” (97:42). Both of Harry’s concepts are brushed by the same uncertainty, and serve as empty and almost meaningless markers of morality and justice within criminal underworlds. In Billboards Mildred champions the idea that the “buck’s got to stop somewhere,” signalling moral culpability (13:10). Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection has been applied psychoanalytically, philosophically, anthropologically and to medical gender studies. (See Trench 2010, for a complex and thorough application of the Abject in relation to the work of Marina Carr, scholarship that has influenced this writing.) Kristeva’s view is that “It is thus not lack of cleanliness

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or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). The Abject is also that which is “thrust aside in order to live” (3). Rina Arya notes: “The abject then is that which traverses and transgresses and that which endangers a structure and finds itself on the wrong side of the boundary, often giving rise to the prohibitions specified by the taboo. The boundary is in place to safeguard systems and functions, and to separate and demarcate different states, such as those of life and death. Without the boundary, we risk the threat of slippage between order and disorder and its corollaries – form/ formlessness and life/death” (413). However, it is Kristeva’s consideration of criminality, in terms of the abject, that is the most apposite here: “Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility” (4). McDonagh’s work is obsessed with crimes, some premediated, some reflexive, some cunning and others not so. In each instance, crime confirms the frailty of the law. But it is McDonagh’s strength to make both crime and the law itself abject, irrespective of the specifics of crimes and irrespective of the veracity, integrity or accuracy of the justice outcomes. The frailty of the law comes about because in McDonagh’s work justice threatens towards the arbitrary, perverse and unnatural forms of justice. Failures to realise the absolutes of justices and the boundaries between essential categories are both a source of discomfort, disbelief and surprise. For Kristeva, “The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them” (15). In McDonagh’s writing, little or nothing seems prohibited, almost always order is turned “aside,” and justice instead of providing a sense of order, “buck stopping”, “Against God” or matters of “principle” invariably “misleads” or falsely (dis)enchants. The uncertainty, inadequacy or insufficiency of motivation for the awful things characters do also is a source of incongruous humour, and the failure to establish motive, means and opportunity complicates the issue of truth beyond reasonable doubt. As motivation is problematised and sometimes tainted with the absurd across the works it is also made abject by the nature of the very uncertainty and precarity that drives actions or inactions. In almost each instance there is a gap between cause and effect, a deliberate rupture

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of causation. Under criminal law, and under the doctrine to determine culpability a person must knowingly and purposefully be aware of their guilty action (Actus reus/Mens rea). Many of McDonagh’s characters demonstrate stunted awarenesses, not quite a total understanding of their actions. Culpability is accordingly complicated. Justice is hazardous in the extreme when served by rogue cops, colonial soldiers, hypocritical totalitarian state investigators, pillars of the literary community, criminals with alleged principles, kangaroo court imitators, lynch mobs and vigilante groupings. And the corrupt that take the law into their own hands, like Maureen, Coleman, Harry Wade, Harry Walters, Carmichael or Mairead who seemingly kill, in Kristeva’s words, “in the name of life,” but also “at the behest of death” (15).

Abject Genres and Violated Bodies Previously, I used the work of Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson’s writings on Grand-Guignol, and how this style connected with morality, violence and sensation to make sense of McDonagh’s anarchic sensibility (Jordan 2014). For Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol “is a kind of carnival ride belonging to the tradition of popular entertainment, a Big Puppet Show or a Puppet Show for Grown-Ups as a literal translation of the theatre’s name suggests” (71). Its staging strategies are a forerunner to early horror films and the blood-shedding found In-Yer-Face-style theatre. Grand-Guignol was reliant on scenes of extreme sensation, including mutilation, amputations, flayings, crucifixions, performed to unnerve and shock, and these map onto Maureen’s torture of her mother in Beauty Queen, and the false gifting of the chopped off ears of Lassie in Lonesome, or Helen’s Ireland versus England game she forces upon Bartley in Inishmaan. In Skull, Grand-Guignol is evident in the perversity of a detective who carries evidence in a plastic bag to confront a suspect in his home, and in how humour, sensation and taboo transgression intertwine when Mairtin checks skeletal remains for their genitals or when Mick spins a yarn about travellers feeding phalluses to dogs. Later when Mick interrogates Mairtin about his friends to see if they might have had a role to play in the extraction of Oona’s remains, Mairtin tries to deflect the blame onto travellers, who might be “expecting another praitie [potato] blight and felt like something to be munching on ahead of time” (SC, 102). Apart from the abject being present in these jokes about the Irish

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Great Famine, it is also evident in the lines about slurry pit deaths, and figures choking on their own vomit. The drunken malleting of the skeletal remains, accompanied by Dana’s saccharine, Eurovision winning-entry, “All Kinds of Everything” is another extreme example. In Dark Matter, Andersen remarks about the Chinese eating puppies and children, in times of want. And the limbs of Mbute/Marjory and Ogechi/Pamela have been forcefully removed, and in the former’s case, traded by Andersen. (The black market in taboo objects features in Spokane.) Ogechi/Pamela’s skeletal remains are gifted by Dickens to Andersen in the form of a marionette, human remains reconstituted as a toy, but the gift is emblematic of slavery and oppression. Psychopath’s inner stories are filmed in a Grand-Guignol style, and become more and more gruesome as the film progresses, particularly the execution of the Zodiac. Humour and horror go hand in hand and inflect simple justice expectations. Equally, the Grand-Guignol-like electrocution and crucifixion of children in Pillowman’s re-enactments are intended to shock. As I mentioned in my analysis the absence of the physical sounds of distress expressed by the little Jesus girl as she is whipped and crucified are important. Behanding’s Grand-Guignol sensibility is most apparent during the play’s crucial “moment of horror,” when the hoarded contents of Carmichael’s suitcase become a potential source for objects that Toby and Marilyn might throw at the lit candle in a can of petrol on stage. When the case bursts open: out spill about 100 human hands and their stinking gloop; some decayed and wizened, some recent and blue, some bloody, some mostly bones, some with a wrist or part of an arm still attached, some just a couple of fingers hanging together with a strip of skin, and some the sad small hands of little children. (BS, 19)

The case of hoarded, abjected hands, suggests impropriety, the treasure throve-quest of Carmichael taken to the limits of absurdity. The manic cream-pie like fight with the mutilated hands in Spokane is a further example of taboo, horror and comedy intersecting. Some hands can end up in the auditorium, and the same can happen with the malleted bones in Skull as numerous reviewers of the work have recorded. Inishmore’s final scene offers a stage covered in blood, and Donny and Davey are tasked with the hacking up of those slain. It is gruesome,

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but also comic, and in productions I have seen, there is no attempt to minimise the artificiality of props, again foregrounding the abject, through horror, shock, fragility, the unreal, the artificial, or the fake. Throughout the scene the conversation is immaculately perverse, particularly Donny and Davey’s divisions of labour discussions.

Suicide/Sacrifice and Abjection Something as traumatic and as unsettling as suicide is treated through sensation, incongruity and the absurd, with a degree of uneasy humour ever present. In Shooter, Donnelly’s suicide attempt is a response to the chaos and injustices of the world. Yet Donnelly’s intent to take his own life has him copycatting the actions of Mrs. Dooley and Kid in many respects. His attempted suicide fails spectacularly thanks to the misfiring gun. The credits roll with White Stripes’s “St James’s Infirmary Blues”; the song’s sensibility adding to the sense of the incongruous and the absurd. In Spokane, Carmichael fails to see through on his intended suicide when his cigarette lighter fails to ignite the room covered in petrol. The religious and sacrificial impulses of Lonesome’s Fr Welsh are in line with the notion of self-sacrifice central to Pillowman and Bruges, whereby irony dilutes and de-substantiates, but does not entirely dissipate the impulse to sacrifice on another’s behalf. In Bruges, Ken’s heroic self-sacrifice is struck by an abject note when the gun intended to be used by Ray to protect himself falls apart on Ken’s landing on the ground. The abject is disruptive here in this instance of Ken dropping from the tower, as it is with Ray’s voice over that ends the film.

Abject Language and Offence Across the works language reveals how different characters are obsessed with difference, and it can entail disability, mental and physical, sizeism, body shaming, and issues of race. The signalling of difference, oddness, peculiarity and the grotesque are norms. Language anomalies that breach either social expectations of respect and political correctness or taboo in orientation are routine, and are additional complicators of justice, as they move the characters beyond straight-jacketed concepts of heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators. Billboard’s single flashback scene has Mildred refusing Angela the use of her car, because Angela has been smoking pot. Angela threatens her mother with the possibility of her own rape, and the mother wishes her

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ill-will, but there is no connection between the language spoken in the exchange and the reality of what happens, making this distressing scene conversationally abject. In Inishmaan, Helen, Bartley, Eileen and Kate are not alone in the general communal bias and insensitivity towards Billy’s disability. Billy is deemed unattractive, his aspirations are laughed at, his interest in reading disparaged, and his general presence is associated with bad luck. Helen equates his distorted body with a mangle phallus—abject territory of subjecting the vulnerable to such horrific slights and bullying. Instead character prejudices are merely foregrounded so that they are found wanting. When Helen agrees to go on a date with Billy, the above negativity is not stacked against her from most audiences’ pointsof-view. Billy’s disability is not a stereotypical trope, all crude associations are variously undermined. Homophobic comments made by Mairtin in Skull, Ray in Bruges, Hans in Psychopaths, often are conceived as indicators of weakness or ineffectiveness, but invariably these comments are found wanting. Mairtin comments that hospital visits for head injuries are only for gay women, but soon afterwards, he decides that a medical check-up is his best option. Humour derived from sizeism is another quick-fire accusation that McDonagh often faces, but the details of the films and plays suggest otherwise. In Bruges, Jimmy features in complex ways: he is drug-addicted, he is racist, he is killed and falsely seen as a child-victim. Ray is obsessed with Jimmy, partially out of his own fixation on suicide, and the disproportionate number of acting stars, small-in-stature, that had taken their own lives. He calls Jimmy names, but Ray does try to save him from Harry. In Billboards James tackles Mildred’s sizeist attitudes, especially in the scene in the restaurant. He is aware of his own adequacies and inadequacies, attributes and weaknesses, but she is not quite the catch she thinks herself to be. The word ‘midget’ flows too easily off Mildred’s tongue. While fixed mindset characters offer world views that are utterly partial and unwholesomely biased, matters get turned and reveal the complicators around issues of injustice, particularly in relation to race. The racist platforming of divisive remarks in Hangmen, Spokane, Bruges, and Billboards reveal a pattern of licensed expression that generates unease, if not offence. My analysis of Spokane suggests that McDonagh approaches the subject of race in a manner that courts controversy. Objections by Als

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to Spokane’s race politics and the outrage generated by Dixon’s alleged transformation in Billboards has already been discussed. Politically correct language is undermined in Spokane and Billboards, especially when Dixon attempts to correct Mildred’s description of the torturing of black people as not “Nigger torturing”, but “Persons of colour torturing” (24:50), an exchange that captures the inappropriateness and boundaries of politically correctness. It is not just male characters that are racist. Dixon’s racism is partly prompted by his mother’s malign attitudes, as is Carmichael’s by his mother’s race hostilities. Indeed, if Mildred is not willing to rank crimes against the black community on the same level as her own, that hierarchy of violation/victimisation is challenged completely by Dark Matter. In Bruges, Ray’s narrowmindedness and willingness to cause offence in terms of xenophobic and racist language is topped by Jimmy’s drug-induced race war scenario, which comes down to skin colour determining one’s side and uniform, only for the discussion to evolve to the point where Jimmy is proposing that one can choose the side one takes. Ken claims that his murdered wife was black (whether African or Caribbean British is never confirmed), and he was very much in love with her, and she was killed by a white cop. Jimmy’s logic gives expression to the notion of race-war abjection, that cannot be just explained away by him taking drugs. The pattern is either express and apologise for an offence, or hail and amplify it, thereby compounding bias, stereotype or heightening offence. As Ferguson has noted in terms of the reinforcements of hypermasculinity and their later conspicuous retraction (2019), in almost all instances offence is followed by its distortion, inversion, undermining or withdrawal. Insults are accommodated not to represent the real, rather to undermine such callous, inadequate expressions and thought processes. Disparaging comments framed by the abject lose their prejudicial value. While there is little consistency in terms of a signalling of white exclusiveness or privilege, given the absence of procreation across the works generally, the ultimate threats are that of miscegenation and white extinction. Indeed, it is mixed-race or same race African-American couples that have something going for themselves. Psychopath’s Myra and Hans are a close knit, inter-race couple, as are Zachariah and Maggie. In Billboards the friendship between Mildred and Denise is a care-centred, cross-race one. It is the poster-man, Jerome who both offers Mildred the replacement billboards and comes to Dixon’s rescue in the bar, overcoming his

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initial reluctance. Jerome’s first encounter with Dixon has him spitting on the ground, when he realises who Dixon is. Thirdly, Willoughby is soft on Dixon, because he believes in his maturation, and, in that way, Willoughby is somewhat tolerant of the racism and homophobia of his officers (not having anyone else is partly an excuse for inaction on discrimination), but the arrival of Abercrombie alters matters significantly. Not only does Abercrombie witness Welby’s assault, but he does something about it, by taking Dixon’s badge and sacking him. Not only is an African-American character determining the nature of justice, but he reiterates his support for Mildred when he tells her that not all the police force is the enemy. A rival argument suggests that Dixon is sacked only because his crime is against a white character, but this is an assault that has a witness. Of course, Dixon is simply sacked, but not charged with a crime. Some argue that McDonagh is an equal opportunities writer in terms of his humour, all individuals are fair game, while others would argue that various minorities and those with disabilities occupy such a disadvantageous, marginalised, and precarious position in societies that they should be doubly protected or excluded from such attempts to find humour. Many are very hostile to McDonagh’s transgressive attempts at humour, in ways that can seem almost vitriolic, and in some regards that is understandable as it is those who are privileged that most often have the luxury of irony, distance and measure. That said, McDonagh as part of a recognisable ethnic minority in Britain, and his advocates would have no time for that sort of vitriolic attack on his writing, seeing it political correctness running amok, humour has few no go areas. Secondly, the most targeted group in terms of McDonagh writing humorously is cis gender males. As default characterisations in the writing homonormative male characters come out worst of all in many respects, as most reversals and underminings come at the expense of their folly. Across the plays and films, whether it is Andersen, Shakespeare, Dickens, the red soldiers or King Leopold II in Dark Matters, Mairead, Padraic and his fellow travellers in Inishmore, Carmichael in Spokane, or Harry and his customers in Hangmen, whiteness is presented as being at the root of most of injustices and violence. Dark Matter foregrounds the violations suffered by African communities by white Europeans, but Mbute/Marjory signals the violence of its own peoples against their own as well. McDonagh complicates the habitus of race and race socialisation, and language steers it close to the abject, where porous boundaries afford marginality and oppression to be accessed in more complicated ways.

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Burning and Abjection Across McDonagh’s work the notion of setting things alight is a major feature, and burning is a clear marker of abjection. Fire brings about transitional, altered and irreversible states. There is Maureen’s scalding of Mag’s with hot oil in Beauty Queen, the burning of the confession by Mick in Skull, Fr Welsh’s burning of his hands in molten plastic and Valene’s part burning of Fr Welsh’s letter in Lonesome. There is the scene in Spokane where Marilyn and Toby are doused with petrol by Carmichael and left chained in a fume-filled room, with a lit candle placed in a can of petrol. Then there is Carmichael’s account of him staunching his own wound after his assault that determines his survival, and there is his failure to set the hotel room alight, denying him the destiny he wishes. Billy’s burning of the American flag and the burning of serial killers’ bodies feature in Psychopaths. The self-immolation in Psychopaths is symbolically transformative as political protest and the interruption of credits at the end of the film seems as it the film is burning, only for the film to cut to an exchange between Marty and Zachariah. Billboards is the most substantial expression of burning as abjection; there is the burning of Angela’s body, the burning down of the billboards by Charlie, Mildred’s fire-bombing of the police station and the physical burns that Dixon suffers. Burning is also central to Dixon’s targeting and suspicion of the soldier whose sick comments about how “hot” the girl who was gang raped was after she was set alight. Dixon rescues the case file from the fire in the station, a gesture that results in nothing beneficial to the resulting investigation, but it does echo Ariel’s quenching and storing of Katurian’s burning stories in Pillowman. Then there is the exploding cow story that Kid is obsessed with in Shooter and the hamster cooking in Skull. Burning of objects, animals and of characters marks the in-between state of fire, its ability for items to change form. Heat gives warmth or can destroy, flesh burned becomes something else, evidence burned like Mick’s confession loses its value, unless there is access to high levels of scientific equipment. Ariel’s quenching of Katurian’s burning stories holds out promise. Based in part on the notion of damnation, meaning an eternity spent burning in hell, we see the significance of fire as punishment in many of the works, especially Bruges, but also fire as renewal, rebirth or at least something close to it. Dixon’s burns carry ceremonial and

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religious resonances in terms of purgatorial pain, and pain experienced in liminal spaces, puts him on the road towards maturation. Dixon’s burned body is somewhat transformative, even if it results from criminal violation and contrasts with the horrors associated with Angela’s burnt remains. When first seen, the decayed billboards are described in the screenplay as “alone like tombstones on the dusty road” (TB, 3). The billboards are linked to death, advertising (Huggies) but also to transformation. Their stark red colouring, black uppercase letters spelling out words of interrogation, and a surrounding black border add to the formulation of the abject. The billboards go from dilapidation, to rejuvenation, to burning, to renewal again, or alternatively, are restored, destroyed and resurrected. Kristeva comments: “No, as in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (3). This is based on the idea that “the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything” (3). Or put differently, “The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life” (4). With the array of violated bodies, especially children, in Bruges for instance, particularly when there is sometimes little to distinguish the innocent and the guilty, there is that “sickening feeling of waste,” but it is more than that. Transgressive glee leads to a certain thrill but there is a perverse optimism in the survival of Mairtin, Wee Thomas, Maria, Shirley, even Katurian’s stories, and there is something life-affirming in the resurrection of characters seemingly dead. The resurrection motif is a dramatic ploy, but it also suggests the permeability of life/death, a reversal of death, life infecting life.

Abject Laughter/Abject Justice Crimes bring to mind the frailties of life, and the frailty of the law. Criminal justice is made abject when victim/perpetrator, punishment/ reward, proponents and enemies of justice are compromised and fail to hold true. In Billboards, Crop Haired Guy threatens Mildred, and makes statements that are conditional, based on “maybes” and insinuations and Mooney in Hangmen provides statements that prove untrue, but each says enough to be regarded as prime suspects. Both Mooney and the Crop Haired Guy are figures audiences are positioned to despise. In some ways, audiences serve as jurors, judges and witnesses,

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and rudimentarily and instinctively put two and two together in ways that are often not entirely logical, and run all too easily with the presumption of guilt. With Mooney a punishment reflex is confounded, a character has been lynch-mobbed for something that has not happened, and the uncertainty as to what Mildred and Dixon will do in Idaho adds additional complicators to the reach and frailty of justice. While never an innocent, per se, Dixon’s punishments does not necessarily match his crimes. Police officers did not burn down her billboards; incorrectly, Mildred decreed them valid targets. Hangmen’s Mooney is punished for something he has not done, but Harry Wade goes unreprimanded as ringleader of a lynch mob, Lonesome’s Coleman is not charged with anything, Inishmore’s Mairead, the one surviving juvenile paramilitary, has no concerns about being pursued for murder, and Beauty Queen’s Maureen is punished by the genre in which the work most situates itself, melodrama, but not by the courts. Bruges’ Ray faces the private judgement of a criminal and Crop Haired Guy in Billboards may be attacked based on the hunch of a racist, sacked police officer. Dark Matters’ Andersen faces no redress for his criminality and Mbute/Marjory’s plan to murder some Belgians may be seem as a legitimate form of self-defence, a necessary trade-off in order to save 10 million Congolese? The abject also complicates the framing of justice/retaliation in terms of necessity. In Inishmore, republican paramilitaries are determined to frame the conflict as a war, thus they claim to have a legitimate right to oppose “military occupation.” “Necessity” is seen as claim that actions are not unlawful “due to a supervening circumstance.” (See Hanly’s application of this idea of necessity to those who protest by doing damage to war planes, but it less likely to be considered in terms of murder, 166.) In Dark Matter, Mbute/Marjory’s claim on necessity, echoes the utilitarian argument that it is better for a small number die so that millions might be saved, but it is difficult to square this claim in terms of the sanctity of each and every human life, but perhaps the carnage of Belgian imperialism and the millions of deaths it will bring is an even greater underming of the sanctity of life argument? (See Hanley’s argument on sanctity, utilitarianism, and given circumstances, 168.) Indeed, is justice simply compensatory or a blood lust, barbaric in its essence, as Pinker’s earlier cited comment suggests? In Mildred’s remark “crucify the mother fuckers?” (71.43) there is a crossing of a line that we might fix upon. The good are not necessarily rewarded and the guilty

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punished. The fates of characters are sometimes genre-determined, like Maureen and Ray’s, but sometimes not. Perversity and disinhibition rupture such simplistic expressions and transactions of justice. In this unequivocal refusal to punish or reward according to legal expectation, anarchy and disorder are neither correctives nor indicative of a naïve abandonment of order. Equally, rescue or survival are also not predetermined by genre, with even the fate of animals not easily anticipated; Lonesome’s Lassie is killed by Coleman, as are the cat and goose by Helen in Inishmaan. Inishmore’s Wee Thomas survives, Sir Roger does not, Psychopath’s Bonny survives, and Shooter’s David does not. Conceptually, in terms of punishment/reward, rescue/destruction both causation and correlation are corrupted by incompatibilities and discontinuities. Kristeva notes: He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you. (4)

Mooney dissembles, is shady only by his admission, sneers rather than smiles, enrages others, sells himself out, kills himself by lynch mob. Without grandeur, Mooney bears all the hallmarks of the abject, a character who has the superficial charm of a sociopath, the mindset of the perverted, and the instinct of a contentious protester. Through Mooney the abject is both a personal and collective horror, with the absence of accountability in the face of the proof as to what has happened for all the spectators to see. Law is dishevelled, misdirected, devious, deviant, defiled, disobeyed, not to dishonour it or reject it, but deflected to signal its precarity and vitality. In Hangmen, the systems and practices of justice are signalled not as objective, impartial and rational, but as indiscriminate—effectively, contingent, trial and error, and happenchance justice—perversely as likely to be wrong as to be right, as the final exchange between Syd and Harry demonstrates. Over Mooney’s covered body, Syd proposes that they should let “Byegones be byegones” and resolve the tensions between them (106). Then the following exchange occurs:

134  E. JORDAN Syd: Aye it were more likely one of them, weren’t it? So … Harry: Aye or neither. (Pause.) I suppose that’s just the way it goes, int it? With Justice. (Pause.) Ah well. You get the arms, I’ll get legs (H, 107).

This awareness of the ambiguities of criminal justice combines with the lack of remorse shown by those involved in the lynching, plus the unwillingness of DCI Fry to intervene and expose the crime that took place all combine to undermine the validity of either the State or lynch-mob justice. Mooney’s remains are to be removed, and his death staged as an accident, his Morris Minor to be driven into the canal. Sen asks that justice be consequence-sensitive, because so many of McDonagh’s characters under-consider consequences as much as they fail to query their own actions. If Syd and Harry fail to countenance accountability, there is something even more sinister in their pragmatic, regret-free attitudes but also in the absence of fear about them being pursued by the justice system. The absence of a fear of being caught is a particular unraveller of justice across almost all of the works. By such contentious and inconvenient means McDonagh affirms the frailties not just of criminal justice, but of social justice most broadly. There is not only revulsion and disgust but glee and voyeurism, whether it is skulls, hands, or dismembered remains. Padraic is the merciful torturer, taking two toenails from the one foot, and advising about tetanus injections with humour and disbelief meeting head on. Abject bodies are all part of the abject othering, and otherness. As Kristeva proposes: “laughing is a way of placing or displacing abjection” (8). It is surprising when some critics claim that morality is weakened by humour or an entertainment impulse. We seldom laugh at, rather we laugh with the characters. With the abject, there is horror in the awareness, not just the terror of chaos, but also the desire for and delight in chaos. There is a connection between offence, taboo violation, the incongruous and laughter. Accordingly, fear and terror are distorted by laughter and taboo transgressions bring disgust and relief but also some delight. Through laughter, often virtue and villainy are left as futile opposites and untenable absolutes. McDonagh’s humorous intent is not a corrective, based on the humiliation of characters in the Bergsonian sense, rather it is a powerful and indiscriminate articulation of a recognition and perhaps an appreciation

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of chaos and the susceptibility of justice. It gives rise to an abject laughter, based less on frailty or uncertainty, but on absence, depravity, horror and precarity. Yet, abject laughter is neither the disdainful laughter of the powerful nor the defiance of the almost powerless. In Dark Matter, McDonagh uses fragility, precarity, perversity to destabilise frameworks of justice and the norms of imperial non-accountability. In drawing on the abject in his various works the concept of justice is clearly not equated with fairness, rights, duties or equality, instead it is deviant and devious, primitive, dangerous, allusive, disavowed, in abeyance. This is not to undermine the credibility of justice, but to galvanise its significance. As Sen insists justice entails rights, interventions and entitlements, but also suggests that justice is comparative and plural, but most of all that justice needs to be consequence-aware, not simply justice for justice’s sake or justice that is done and seen to be done. McDonagh’s tethering of criminal justice to the abject ensures a challenge to any unifocal, transcendental and victim-only views of justice. Indeed, there is great virtue in that strategy as there is in the denial of the reassuring and comforting forms of criminal justice outcomes found in a great deal of popular culture.

Conclusion: Criminal Law/Wholesale Injustices The publication is not just about breaches and enforcements of criminal law, nor about the inappropriate usages of the language and ideas of justice, but about how a more expansive theorisation of justice can inform reflections on McDonagh’s work more broadly. Sen has articulated the importance of having a “strong perception of manifest injustice,” and what may move us is not merely “the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remedial injustices around us which we want to eliminate” (vii). Amongst those that tolerate, even support the inequalities that neo-liberal market forces propagate, most would still express support for or even pay lip service to broader universal principles of justice, in terms of rights, obligations and liberties, and for certain “remedial” actions. (In Hangmen, Mooney states provocatively: “But you can get away with anything when you’ve the cash, can’t you? Money talks, I’ve always found” [H, 68].) Despite all the current global conflicts, today’s world is more charter, rights and justice-orientated than ever in history, well beyond mere lip-service to justice, in its broadest application.

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For Sen, in the context of imperfection and comparative claims on justice, reason rather than idealism, and outcomes rather than institutional frameworks must be the key drivers of change. He proposes that “[H]umane and sympathetic reasoning,” that is both public and private, must be measured, deliberative, plural and impartial (261). Sen argues for the ranked responsibilities of those in power. And Sen’s reflections are not just on present tense justice but offer a road map for sustainable and enhanced forms of future-orientated justice. Specifically, in relation to justice, equality, race and to a degree, gender and class, McDonagh is not hankering after some essence of justice or even how justice might be necessarily enhanced, nor is he inclined to claim that justice is merely a myth, inaccessible, unviable, unavailable to most. Indeed, McDonagh is not saying anything terribly different about the various manifestations of injustice, the incompetence or corruption of a powerful or the inadequacies of the rule of law to what many other writers have already articulated about issues of colonial injustices, miscarriages of justice, and inequalities, more broadly. What McDonagh does differently is to refuse to make the case simply through rationality, impartiality and debate, evident in his characters encounters or not with the administration of justice within the criminal law system. Always, there is considerable irony in the fact that characters who are agents of the law and/or advocates of freedom, so easily trample on the rights of others, ensuring that the achievements and failures, indulgences and hypocrisies of criminal justice are filtered in multiple ways. Although McDonagh interlocks the multiple fiascos of Irish, British, and more lately American criminal law systems to provide the most clearcut manifestation of the dilemmas of justice more broadly, he refuses to explain individual character behaviours only in relation to dominant, hegemonic ideology. McDonagh declines to differentiate easily between institutions and individual characters, indispensably refusing to equate the apparently powerless (marginalised, subjugated and objectified) with an absence of agency that affords blanket victimhood. His working-class characters are disadvantaged by the law, but are not necessarily or consequentially the passive victims of systemic injustices. Vitally, in McDonagh’s work, those characters that are relatively powerless exhibit as much corruption and incompetence as establishment figures. The ideas, dispositions and behaviours of the less powerful do not “survive open and informed scrutiny,” as Sen encourages, any more than elite

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figures (385). McDonagh’s writings offers a form of social parity, which most others refuse to consider. In representations of criminal law within popular culture, when crime impacts on the lives of characters, the competency of those investigating is unquestionable, and the recourse to justice is as normal as it is inevitable. As already argued, deviant or evil characters will invariably face the full rigours of the law. Representations of insurmountable injustices in film, television and theatre speak back in challenging and sometimes complex ways to the real, especially when work is less formulaic and conventional. And while violence is almost omnipresent in many plays and especially in films and television, it is not necessarily the case that audiences/readers regard this omnipresence as mimicking somewhat their own everyday reality. Conventional wisdom would have citizens internalise the non-violent nature of democracy more generally, especially in first world cultures, and that it is occasional rather than widespread systemic violence that is the norm, in contrast to Žižek, who insists on the pervasiveness of objective violence, the dark powers that keep societies in place (1). In theatre, it is often all too easy to preach what the right thing to do is, chiming with a liberal-humanist, equality agenda. Perhaps, it should not be that easy to spot the victim, and to align comfortably with the side of the righteous? The law itself is hardly ever scrutinised. In McDonagh’s work, the overwhelming comfort of evidential criminal justice, of doing the right thing, and a sentiment of seeing justice done and putting things to right is questioned, whether it is a fancifully consoling or a delusional face-saving narrative device. There is something positive in complicating or even refusing to reinforce sentiments about the criminal law found in popular culture more generally. The law itself is invariably problematic. Criminal justice speaks to the larger injustices associated with imperialism, class, gender, and race inequalities, discriminations and subjugations. Encounters with and occurrences within the criminal justice system are indicative of widespread inequalities. The rights, obligations and practices around justice we associate with participative democracies are fundamentally breached on an ongoing basis in McDonagh’s works. Unlike Sen, McDonagh, offers no essence of justice per se, but like Sen, from a writing point of view he is comfortable and accomplished in identifying rival and comparative systems of justice, and not just disorder for disorder’s sake. McDonagh circulates in his work a heterogeneity of compatible, hostile and mismatched systems of justice, ones incompatible

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with criminal law more generally. As agents, benefactors, beneficiaries, victims, consumers, romanticisers, dissenters, deniers and perverters of justice, characters are summoned and seduced by justice, fixate on and fetishise it, but are often let down by justice and exposed by its inadequacies. In McDonagh’s work, a simple anti-violence position is deemed sentimental or indulgent. And like Sen, McDonagh is comfortable with the fact that “non-congruent considerations” do not make a broad theory “incoherent, unmanageable, or useless” (397). In both the denial and undoing of justice there is the evidence of McDonagh’s ultimate advocacy and “diagnosis of justice” (Sen, 388). When justice, writ large, is not natural, fair or inevitable, but arbitrary, equivocal, self-righteous, conditional, disproportionate and random, the implication is not that justice is simply a delusion of a rights-based system, or that the writer’s anarchic inclinations demonstrate an indifference to justice and its advocacy. Neither the insufficiency nor the absence of the vindication of any system of justice make McDonagh’s work simply irresponsibly anarchic, post-modern or post-justice in orientation. In the plurality of perspectives on crime and justice there are lots of contradictions and friction. Irony does not undercut a “message”, it extends it by keeping it open. Fragments reside alongside other fragments of justice, as anomalies and inconsistencies ensure that straight line, emphatic and highly legible forms of morality, truth and justice are signalled as defunct writing strategies. Theatre and film audiences are the ones obliged to negotiate with what seems to be the complications and implications of improbable, intractable and irreconcilable manifestations of justice/injustice, ensuring that the burdens, safeguards and entitlements, enforcements and punishments, appeals and redress, and conditions and consequences of an inclusive rather than exclusive justice are not for the faint-hearted. So, it is not that the frailties and precariousness of justice that win out, not justice that is transcendental or at any cost, rather it is the virtue of the absolute necessity of justice, in the broadest application of the word, that McDonagh’s work signals. The question of course is what we owe to one another as global citizens?

Works Cited Arya, Rina. 2014. “The Many Faces of Abjection: A Review of Recent Literature.” Journal for Cultural Research 18 (4): 406–415. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14797585.2014.941162.

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Hanly, Conor. 2006. An Introduction to Irish Criminal Law, 2nd ed. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Jordan, Eamonn. 2014. From Leenane to LA: The Theatre and Cinema of Martin McDonagh. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity. London: Penguin Books. Sandel, Michael J. 2009. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sen, Amartya. 2010. The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin. Trench, Rhona. 2010. Bloody Living: The Loss of Selfhood in the Plays of Marina Carr. Berne: Peter Lang.

Primary Sources McDonagh, Martin. 1997. The Cripple of Inishmaan. London. Methuen. ———. 1999. The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, and The Lonesome West in Plays 1. London: Methuen. ———. 2001. The Lieutenant of Inishmore. London: Methuen. ———. 2003. The Pillowman. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2008. In Bruges. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2011. A Behanding in Spokane. New York. Dramatists Play Services Inc. ———. 2015. Hangmen. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2017. Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2018. A Very Very Very Dark Matter. London: Faber and Faber.

Films ———. 2005. Six Shooter (Written and Directed by Martin McDonagh) (A Missing in Action and Funny Farm Films Production, Film Four Bord Scannán Na hÉireann/The Irish Film Board). ———. 2008. In Bruges (Written and Directed by Martin McDonagh) (Blueprint Pictures, Film4, Focus Features and Scion Films). ———. 2012. Seven Psychopaths (Written and Directed by Martin McDonagh) (Film4, Blueprint Pictures, British Film Institute). ———. 2017. Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri (Written and Directed by Martin McDonagh) (Film4 and British Film Institute, Hanway Films and Blueprint Pictures).

Index

A Abject, 34, 35, 54, 55, 122–124, 126–129, 131–135. See also Abjection Abjection, 122, 128, 130, 131, 134 Abolition of capital punishment, 15, 42 Ackles, Johnetta Eula’Mae, 98 African-American, 84–86, 103, 108, 111, 112, 128, 129 Akşehir-Uygur, Mahinur, 4, 5 Als, Hilton, 4, 5, 88, 89, 127 Altruism, 71, 85 Andersen, Hans Christian, 70, 95–103, 125, 129, 132 Arya, Rina, 123 Atlantic Theater Company, 38

Beyond reasonable doubt, 6, 12, 21, 32, 37, 39, 41, 45, 120, 121, 123 Birmingham Pub Bombings, 68 Birmingham Six, 15, 68, 69, 110 Bloody Sunday, 77 Body violation, 5 Brantley, Ben, 5, 54 Bright Clay, Linda, 92 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 20, 22, 91 British Theatre, 23 Britt-Gibson, Darrell, 112 Broadbent, Jim, 98 Broadway, 33, 38, 84 Bryld, Eigil, 57 Burning, 104, 108, 122, 130, 131 Burrell, Carter, 57

B Baron-Cohen, Simon, 47 Belgium, 6 Bernardin, Marc, 111 Bettelheim, Bruno, 64, 65, 70, 98

C Cahill, Maria, 79 CAIN Web Service, 68, 69 Capital Punishment. See Abolition of Capital punishment

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 E. Jordan, Justice in the Plays and Films of Martin McDonagh, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30453-9

141

142  Index Catholicism, 9, 29, 35, 36, 46, 51, 55, 58, 77, 91 Chambers, Lilian, 3 Channel 4, 20, 22 Clare, David, 3 Clerical abuse, 106 Clift, Montgomery, 51 Condon, Kerry, 34, 108 Confession. See Sacrament of penance Confessional seal, 50, 51 Congo, 6 Conroy, Rúaidhrí, 47, 48 Cornish, Abbie, 108 Coveney, Michael, 42 Crowley, John, 66, 84 Culpability, 11, 14, 15, 28, 50, 62, 66, 109, 122, 124 D Daniel, Radcliffe, 33 Dargis, Manohla, 2, 58 Deane, Seamus, 78 Diaspora/Diasporic, 1, 2, 42, 68, 69, 71 Dinklage, Peter, 108 Downing Street Declaration, 77 Druid Theatre, 27, 33 Dunster, Mathew, 38, 43 E Empathy, 2, 35, 48, 51, 57, 107 Extinction, 128 F Fairy tales, 26, 46, 54, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 97, 98 Farce, 5, 52, 54, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83 Farrell, Colin, 56, 57, 90 Ferguson, Molly, 4, 103, 110, 128 Fiennes, Ralph, 56

FitzPatrick Dean, Joan, 3, 4, 6, 43, 57 Fitzpatrick, Lisa, 4 Flaherty, Robert J., 33, 37 Fleischle, Anna, 97 Flynn, Johnny, 43 Friedman, Les, 113 Friel, Brian, 96 G Gandhi, Mahatma, 113 Gardner, Lynn, 34 Genre, 2, 5, 14, 15, 24, 26, 54, 60, 61, 84, 111, 132, 133 Gibbons Hill, Joe, 26 Gilbert, Helen, 99 Gleeson, Brendan, 47, 56 The Good Friday Agreement, 77 Grandage, Michael, 33, 76 Grand-Guignol, 2, 24, 66, 86, 98, 124, 125 Great Depression, 37 Greene, Sarah, 33 Grene, Nicholas, 4 Grotesque, 2, 4, 65, 98, 122, 126 Guildford Four, 15, 68, 69, 78, 110 Guilt, 6, 11, 12, 14, 21, 31, 40, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56–58, 62, 66, 102, 107, 109, 114, 120, 121, 132 H Hand, Richard J., 124 Harrelson, Woody, 90, 105 Haughton, Miriam, 4 Heaven, 53, 58 Hell, 28, 29, 58, 91, 130 Hollywood, 9, 19, 33, 90 Humour, 46, 52, 54, 88, 89, 111, 123–127, 129, 134 Hynes, Garry, 26, 33–35, 49, 54 Hytner, Nicholas, 33, 94

Index

I Ideological, 3, 61, 64, 78, 82, 113, 114 Ideology, 7, 15, 61, 62, 78, 80, 81, 84, 95, 114, 136 Imperialism, 36, 37, 78, 81, 83, 94, 99–102, 113, 132, 137 Innocent/Innocence, 6, 7, 12, 14, 21, 28, 32, 40, 41, 49, 50, 62, 67, 71, 76, 78, 80, 90, 110, 114, 120, 121, 131, 132. See also presumption of innocence Inquest, 5, 26, 28 In-Yer-Face, 4 Irish Free State, 36, 37 Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), 77, 103, 110, 114 ITV, 20, 22 Ivanek, Željko, 59, 105 J James, Caryn, 49 Jones, Therese, 113 Jordan, Eamonn, 1–3 K Kangaroo Court, 6, 12, 14, 64, 79, 110, 124 Kazan, Zoe, 84 Kermode, Mark, 113 Kinlan, Laurence, 35 Kristeva, Julia, 122–124, 131, 133, 134 Kurdi, Mária, 3 L Lahr, John, 4 Landry Jones, Caleb, 105 Lanters, José, 4, 6, 42, 43

  143

Laughter, 15, 54, 101, 122, 134, 135 Lonergan, Patrick, 3–5 Loyalist, 68, 76, 77, 79, 82 Luckhurst, Mary, 81 Lynch mob, 6, 12, 13, 40, 110, 124, 132, 133 M Mackie, Anthony, 84 Maguire Seven, 68, 69 McDonagh, Martin The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Beauty Queen), 3, 23 A Behanding in Spokane (Spokane), 3, 84 In Bruges (Bruges), 4, 9, 56 Hangmen (Hangmen), 3, 6, 13, 15, 32, 38, 42, 43, 61, 64, 72, 109, 110, 127, 129, 131–133, 135 The Lieutenant of Inishmore (Inishmore), 4, 76 The Lonesome West (Lonesome), 37, 45, 46, 48–51, 54, 56, 108, 124, 126, 130, 132, 133 The Pillowman (Pillowman), 4, 65 Seven Psychopaths (Psychopaths), 48 Six Shooter (Shooter), 2, 46 A Skull in Connemara (Skull), 3, 27 Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri (Billboards), 3 A Very Very Very Dark Matter (Dark Matter), 6 McDonald, Henry, 77 McDormand, Frances, 104 Melnikova, Irina, 58 Melodrama, 24, 26, 132 Middeke, Martin, 3 Milam, Wilson, 76 Milner Davis, Jessica, 54 Miscegenation, 128

144  Index

O O’Brien, Catherine, 4, 57 O’Hagan, Sean, 4, 77 O’Sullivan, Aisling, 47 O’Toole, Fintan, 4, 5, 24

Rawls, John, 8 Rees, Catherine, 5 Religion, 4, 15, 55 Religious iconography, 58 Republicanism, 76–78, 80, 81, 84, 113, 114 Rewards, 6, 23, 58, 83, 122 Richards, Shaun, 4 Rockwell, Sam, 84, 88, 90, 105, 111 Roeg, Nicholas, 33, 102 Rouse, Margitta, 4, 9, 58 Royal Court, 23, 27, 38, 50 Royal Shakespeare Company, 76

P Paramilitarism, 83 Paramilitary. See Paramilitarism Parker, Alan, 41 Pask, Scott, 66 Peace process, 81 Peters, Clarke, 108 Pierrepoint, Albert, 6, 38, 40, 42 Pilný, Ondřej, 4, 6, 42, 61 Pinker, Steven, 6, 35, 61, 62, 76, 87, 101, 132 Poésy, Clémence, 46 Popular culture, 7, 19, 29, 135, 137 Prentice, Jordan, 60 Presumption of innocence, 12, 21, 37, 40, 41, 51, 79, 120 Prevention of Terrorism Act (The), 68 Provisional IRA, 68, 77

S Sacrament of penance, 55, 56 Sacrifice, 41, 53, 70, 93, 122, 126 Sandel, Michael, J., 10, 41, 46, 76, 79, 82, 83 Scorsese, Martin, 90 Sen, Armatya, 8–10, 43, 46, 55, 61, 72, 75, 77–82, 89, 101, 134–138 Sexton III, Brendan, 91, 109 Shakespeare, William, 94, 95, 99, 100, 129 Sheridan, Jim, 78 Sierz, Aleks, 4 Sizeism, 126, 127 Sleight-of-frame, 2 Sommerlad, Joe, 111 Suicide, 26, 41, 48, 51–53, 55, 58, 65, 91, 92, 122, 126, 127

R Race, 4, 7, 85–89, 95–98, 101–103, 111, 112, 126–129, 136, 137 Racism, 87–89, 94, 111–113, 128, 129 Ramachandran, V.S., 86 Ravenhill, Mark, 67

T Taylor, Paul, 4 Theatre of the Absurd, 86 Tompkins, Joanne, 99 Tony Awards, 24 Totalitarian, 46, 61–63, 67, 68, 71, 72, 124

Moore, Thomas, 104 Msiska, Mpalive-Hangson, 96 N National Theatre, 33, 36, 61, 66

Index

Totalitarianism, 61, 62, 72 Tragicomedy, 47, 89 Trench, Rhona, 122 The Troubles, 80, 83 U Utichi, Joe, 90 V Vietnam War, 59, 91, 93 W Waits, Tom, 91, 97 Walken, Christopher, 84, 88, 90 Wallace, Clare, 4–5

  145

Warner, Marina, 95 Warren, Amanda, 91, 109 Warrington bombing, 68, 77, 81 Weitz, Eric, 2 West-End, 38 Whiteness, 89, 111, 112, 129 Wilmot, David, 47 Wilson, Michael, 124 Worthen, Bill, 4, 61 Worthen, Hana, 4, 61 Y Young, Harvey, 101 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 62, 88, 114, 137