Lonesome West
Born and raised in London by Irish expats who returned to their native Galway when he was a teenager, leaving him to fend for himself in England, McDonagh reeks of ambivalence about his roots, both ethnic and literary. Despite his English upbringing, all his plays so far have been set on the west coast of Ireland, near where his parents were born–the same picturesque world of bogs and tiny villages and lonely cottages found in William Butler Yeats’s poetry and John Millington Synge’s plays. McDonagh doesn’t valorize the view of Ireland as quaint and charming, but like a rebellious adolescent he can’t turn his back completely on the romanticized Ireland he rejects.
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The Lonesome West is a play set on a confluence of fault lines, at once cynical and sentimental, cruel and sweet, filled with violence and with the hope for peace. It is both fatally disenchanted with Ireland and nostalgic for that enchantment. Two middle-aged bachelor brothers living in the same small cottage are united by their knowledge of a terrible crime. One brother, Valene, is blackmailing the other, Coleman, financially and emotionally for his murder of their father. But their sickness runs much deeper than the patricide, which is fairly recent.
You’d expect an urban, cynical writer like McDonagh to repudiate schmaltz. But he’s far too complex a playwright to follow a predictable or easy line. “People should leave a theater with the same feeling that you get after a really good rock concert,” McDonagh said in an interview. “You don’t want to talk about it, you just let it buzz into you. I can’t stand people analyzing things. A play should be a thrill like a fantastic roller coaster.” Since McDonagh violates all our expectations by the end of the first act, The Lonesome West is thrilling indeed.
