A Skull in Connemara

by Martin McDonagh

Overview

Winner 1996 Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright; Winner 1996 George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright

For one week each autumn, Mick Dowd is hired to disinter the bones in certain sections of his local cemetery, to make way for new arrivals. As the time approaches for him to dig up those of his own late wife, strange rumours regarding his involvement in her sudden death seven years ago gradually begin to resurface.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472539243
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	07/10/2014
Series:	Modern Plays
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Martin McDonagh was born in London in 1970. Most of his early writing consisted of radio plays and screenplays, until he wrote a series of theatre plays in 1994/1995 that would bring success. In 1999 The Lonesome West was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. Other plays that were published and produced are A Skull in Connemara (1997), The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001, nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2006) and The Pillowman (2003). The Pillowman won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2004, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2005. Martin McDonagh is the first dramatist since Shakespeare to have four works professionally produced on the London stage in one single season.

Martin McDonagh is a London-born Irish playwright whose first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane was the 1996 winner of the George Devine Award. It also won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Fringe Play and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. The play was nominated for six Tony awards, of which it won four, and the Laurence Olivier Award. Since then McDonagh has gone on to write multiple smash-hit shows and films and win multiple awards including an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film for Six Shooter (2005), an Oscar nomination, a British Independent Film Award for best screenplay, an Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild Award for Best Film Script and a BAFTA for best original screenplay, all for In Bruges (starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, 2008), and a Laurence Olivier award for Best New Play for The Pillowman (won 2004).

Editorial Reviews

Mr. McDonagh's great strength is that he combines a love of traditional storytelling with the savage ironic humour of the modern generation...In A SKULL IN CONNEMARA, a gravedigger, whose job is to disinter the bones of seven-year-old corpses and smash them to pulp, is hotly suspected of killing his wife.

The Guardian (UK)