Of Irish interest

This week's New Yorker (issue dated 6th March) has a profile of London/Galway playwright Martin McDonagh by Fintan O'Toole [no link, unfortunately]. To be honest we're no more moved to see McDonagh's plays after reading it than before, but he's certainly an interesting character. 2 quick observations.

McDonagh talks about the anti-IRA plot of The Lieutenant of Inishmore: "I was trying to write a play that would get me killed ... I had no real fear that I would be, because the paramilitaries never bothered with playwrights anyway, but if they were going to start I wanted to write something that would put me top of the list." Unfortunately, Gary Mitchell beat him there.

O'Toole recounts an incident during the rehearsals for the New York City production of the same play involving the idea of using a Cat Scratch Fever t-shirt in a scene, which is described as a song by Motorhead. This is a dreadful slip by the New Yorker editors, who normally get their umlauts just right, even the grammatical relative used in a double vowel word like reenforce. Because, after all, it's Motörhead. And while they did record that song, it's more associated with Ted Nugent. Which makes it just as well that McDonagh was not keen on building in a reference to it.