A Study On The Family Ethics Deviation In Martin McDonagh's "Leenan Town Trilogy

Martin Mc Donagh(1970-),a famous contemporary Irish/British playwright with extraordinary artistic imagination,depicts the ethical anomie of three Irish families in his classic plays “The Leenane Trilogy”(The Beauty Queen of Leenane,A Skull in Connemara,The Lonesome West)with the background of Leenane—a real village in County Galway in western Ireland,creating a “black” world against traditional harmonious impression where domestic disintegration,moral decay and legal invalidity exist.The Beauty Queen of Leenane shows the interdependent and tormented mother-daughter relationship between Mag and her daughter Maureen.The twisted ethical relationship is reminiscent of intricate and tangled colonial relationship between Ireland and Britain.Therefore,Maureen’s ethical anomie of matricide can be seen as a historical portrayal of Ireland’s predicament of national identity after its independence from colonial rule.In A Skull in Connemara,a question is raised“whether Mick,the gravedigger,who was always reticent about his wife’s death,killed his wife ? ” on which the story is based.The obscure relationship between the couple metaphorically refers to a painful history—the Great Famine in Ireland.The secret murder is potentially intertextualized with the historical event of the Great Famine,which expresses the author’s concerns for the distortion and cover-up of the historical truth.The intense and exhausting relationship between Valene and Coleman in The Lonesome West is a metaphor for the tragic civil war in Ireland,which makes Irish people reflect on the history that shouldn’t be forgotten.Also,the author creates an image of a Welsh priest who tries to awake the conscience of the two brothers by committing suicide after his unsuccessful mediation between them,metaphorizing the hard circumstances of traditional religion in contemporary Ireland and the crisis of spirituality among the Irish.The family ethics tragedies in Mc Donagh’s “The Leenane Trilogy” is a bold subversion and deconstruction of the traditional western family in Irish theater history,which is full of betrayal,violence,injury and torture,and short of stability,unity and harmony.The characters in the play break the ethical order of the family,defy the received moral code,and commit ethical crimes with the connivance of the family over and over again,leading to a weakening of their ethical consciousness,reflecting the ethical crisis in the society.Mc Donagh uses the writing method of metaphor to express his humanistic concern for Irish history and social crisis by concentrating on the time and space and the detailed characterization of the characters,focusing on the anomie of family ethics among family members.In short,“The Leenane Trilogy” not only reveals the painful experience of contemporary Ireland in the transition of the times and society,but also contributes a dark,grotesque and unique picture of theatrical family to Irish theater.