Humor Meets Misery in McDonagh's 'Three Billboards'

In 1994, a 24-year-old unemployed Londoner named Martin McDonagh sat down and wrote seven plays in just a  year. Six were set in the stark terrain of Connemara and its nearby islands, the rural area of western Ireland where his parents were born. The seventh play takes place in a future dictatorship, where secret police interrogate a playwright after a mad man begins committing the gruesome acts of child torture described in his work.

That last one, , is named for McDonagh’s idea of a fairy-tale character—a man made of pillows who mercifully convinces the tortured children to take their own lives. The Irish plays are populated with similarly cheery sorts, among them a sadistic soldier who unleashes murderous hell after he finds his ); a boy with creeping tuberculosis who vainly dreams of movie stardom—when he’s not being beaten half to death by the locals (); and a lonely woman who kills her spiteful, belittling mother with a fire poker ().