10 Things That Will Put You in the Mood for The Banshees of Inisherin

Posted on October 21, 2022

by Eric P

Irish writer Martin McDonagh burst onto the theatre scene as a fierce young playwright having famously written seven full-length plays in a manically productive nine-month period while living alone in South London, relying on public assistance to pay for food, bills, and – I’m guessing – a whole lot of paper.

When those plays, including The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Lonesome West, hit the West End and Broadway, he became an instant sensation for his unruly theatrical vision, earthy and impious and very, very Irish.

Soon McDonagh was making movies, including Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, that got attention and won awards but weren’t always quite so Irish. But this month brings to theaters a new McDonagh movie, The Banshees of Inisherin, with a very Irish title that used to be attached to an old unproduced play of his but really sounds like what an A.I. program would come up with if you asked it to generate a Martin McDonagh project.

If McDonagh’s writing is your jam – mordantly funny, occasionally brutal, urgent and disreputable, drenched in local color and did I mention sometimes pretty Irish – here are a few other plays and movies that might appeal to you.

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