Globalizing McDonagh: The Playwright in Performance on the World Stage

In this thesis, I demonstrate how Martin McDonagh’s plays, both in text and performance, express the destructive, homogenizing, or stereotype-reinforcing element of globalization, as well as the positive elements of globalization including globalized cultural exchange and (g)localization. My original contribution to knowledge is the in-depth research surrounding the effect of globalization on the theatre by using an extremely globalized playwright to demonstrate this phenomenon. The introduction is used to situate McDonagh in terms of ‘in-yer-face theatre,’ explore existing scholarship on his work, and introduce McDonagh’s globalized identity, created in a small part by the playwright’s actual background, but in large part by the media. McDonagh’s reputation is due to the fast exchange of information and disinformation.

In the second chapter, I explore the varying definitions of globalization and its relationship to the theatre; specifically with reference to the plays of McDonagh. I then explore the proposed solutions to globalization including cosmopolitanism, localization, and ‘glocalization,’ and their relationship to the theatre and McDonagh’s plays. I conclude that these elements are not in fact solutions to globalization, but elements that function within the framework of globalization. In the chapters that follow, I examine the relationship of globalization to McDonagh’s work by analysing the representations of terror, terrorization, and humour in the plays, McDonagh’s work performed in translation, and the risk of accepting McDonagh’s work as authentically Irish. In order to do so, I use examples of McDonagh’s plays in performance from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, the United States, and Turkey. Globalization, in both its positive form of globalized exchange and negative form of McWorld, or the widespread homogenization of culture and economies, is intrinsic to both the fabric of the plays as well as the contexts in which they are performed. However one defines globalization, we are unarguably living globalization now, and must endeavour to understand what this means in all disciplines, including the theatre.