In the United States, Martin McDonagh, the London-born Irish filmmaker, is known for his award-winning Hollywood movies. In 2022, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” McDonagh’s most recent film, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, was nominated for best picture and best director.
But before rising onto the Hollywood scene, McDonagh was a successful playwright.
And in Russia, his plays are spectacularly popular — for the past two decades, they’ve been staged in cities and towns across the country hundreds of times.
The man credited for popularizing McDonagh’s plays in Russia is Sergei Fedotov, the founder and artistic director of the “U Mosta” theater in Perm, Russia.
“We’re the only theater in the world that’s staged all of McDonagh’s plays,” Fedotov said last year, talking about McDonagh on Russian TV.
Fedotov’s theater has also hosted four Martin McDonagh Theater Festivals, and Fedotov has even claimed that McDonagh’s plays have something quintessentially Russian about them.
Earlier this month, a new translated collection of McDonagh’s nine plays was published in Russia. Film critic Anton Dolin wrote the foreword to the new collection:
“I really like this contradiction that McDonagh has in everything he’s doing. The contradiction of [the] beauty of it. Sometimes it’s beauty of language, sometimes it’s beauty of landscape, beauty of music, and the ugliness of what’s going on really, what people do to each other.”
Most of McDonagh’s early plays take place in rural Ireland. Characters are often isolated — weighed down by their environment, family, village — unable to break away.
“Being connected to the place and cursed with this connection,” Dolin wrote. “Dreaming about something else and have no possibility to go there. Being obliged to this home hell with people who are closest to you, but you still hate them, and they hate you. This is [a] very Russian thing.”
In Russia, suppression of free speech is one of the main features of President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian leadership.
In the past three years, theater directors and playwrights have been imprisoned for their political convictions.
Anton Khitrov, a Russian culture critic based in Germany, has a different explanation for McDonagh’s popularity in Russia. He said that in the Soviet Union theater was censored by the state, so every production had to fit Soviet ideology.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian audiences were looking for something new.
“The most important thing about it, that they were modern plays. Because in the ‘90s, all Russian theater was about [Anton] Chekhov,” Khitrov said. “They were like okay, we don’t have any Soviet censorship anymore, we don’t have to stage plays about [Vladimir] Lenin, let’s stage Chekhov and only Chekhov, and sometimes [William] Shakespeare.”
But Shakespeare and Chekov no longer cut it — Russians thirsted for contemporary voices and a way to break with the past into a new era of theater in Russia.
“I think Martin McDonagh is a playwright they needed to create a totally not Soviet type of theater,” Khitrov said. “It’s a type of theater where you can see violence on stage, when you can hear cursing on stage.”
McDonagh’s plays are known to be raw, violent — often brutal — but still deeply human.
His plays were a breath of fresh air in the mid-2000s, and they remain among the most popular plays in Russia today.
And now, even as freedom of expression has devolved yet again, Khitrov explained that censorship in Russia today is unlike Soviet censorship.
“Now in Russia, they allow something,” he said. “You can work with McDonagh, that’s okay, you can stage McDonagh. Like if it’s not political, if it’s not about all these dangerous, dangerous things, if it’s not pro-war but it’s something neutral, it’s fine.”
Khitrov said that cultural repression in Russia relies on unpredictability. Artists know there’s a red line somewhere, but it’s invisible — cross it, and you could end up in jail.
And yet, film critic Anton Dolin said foreign plays, like those written by Martin McDonagh, are less likely to ruffle the state’s feathers for the simple reason that they’re perceived to be about someone else. Not about Russians, or Russia itself.
“When you know that it comes from some other place, some other land, you have this distance, it’s not so painful. You know that it’s written by McDonagh, so it’s Russia but not totally,” Dolin said. “When you have this distance, you have more freedom, you have more freedom to laugh at the pain of the characters, when it’s your own pain, it can become too painful.”
That distance is perhaps one of the reasons McDonagh’s plays are so popular in Russia. The themes feel oddly close to home — the brutality, the dark humor and the pain cuts through — but still, it’s not Russia, it’s all happening somewhere else.