According to playwright Martin McDonagh, theatres have refused to revive his work because he would not permit language alterations. He attributes the desire of some venues to make his performances more “palatable” to “petty outrage.”
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today that it is a “major problem” and a “dangerous place” for writers.
Earlier this year, The Banshees of Inisherin was nominated for nine Academy Awards.
His 2003 play The Pillowman, about a writer imprisoned by a totalitarian state, will be revived in June on London’s West End, with Steve Pemberton and Lily Allen in the principal roles.
The nonprofit organization PEN International has partnered with the production to support “many of the values we promote, such as tolerance, critical thinking, and informed debate.”
“Only in the past few years have theatre companies refused to perform my plays due to objectionable language,” McDonagh stated.
Despite the fact that he is “an established writer who sells tickets,” they wanted to make certain terms “more palatable to them or to their intended audience,” he said.
There was a backlash after the publisher of Roald Dahl’s stories announced that some of the languages would be altered to make them suitable for modern audiences.
In February, the decision was reversed after prominent authors, including Salman Rushdie, labeled its censorship and the prime minister’s spokesman stated that fictional works should be “preserved and not airbrushed.”
With his fictional writings, McDonagh has long courted controversy.
In 2006, he told the magazine The New Yorker that his play The Lieutenant of Inishmore was the result of “trying to write a play that would kill me.”
The play satirized an IRA paramilitary returning home and brutally avenging his cat’s death.
Despite the case of Salman Rushdie, who received death threats for years over his writing and was slashed last year, McDonagh asserts that writers should not fear personal injury threats because “it may not exist anyway.”
I believe it’s a good idea to write something dangerous or explosive, he told BBC Radio 4.
Martin McDonagh stated that state-sanctioned censorship of authors is “not improving,” adding, “It appears that governments are becoming increasingly afraid of dissenting voices.”
He says,
“Pemberton and Allen will feature in a new production of his play The Pillowman because they are “cool people and quite dangerous in their own art forms,”
“I believe it is a frightening time,” he continued, suggesting that new writers “get off social media,” “stop checking the internet,” and “go out and outrage.”
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