Saint Martin

There was nothing on Martin McDonagh's resume to suggest that by the age of 27 he would have two shows opening Off Broadway within a few weeks of each other. McDonagh abandoned education at 16 and suffered long periods of unemployment during which he developed a guilty passion for daytime TV. But he also used his time to write, turning out plays by the month and sometimes in a matter of days. The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which opens at the Atlantic Theater in February, took all of eight days to write. The Cripple of Inishmaan, which follows in early March at the Public Theater, was completed in less than five weeks.

McDonagh arrived in London's West End from Camberwell, in South London, with a pile of scripts and almost no experience of live theater. After the successful launch of his first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, by the Royal Court Theatre in 1996, he won the London Evening Standard's, Most Promising Playwright award. His ear for dialogue, his economy and sense of structure seemed astonishingly well formed.

Yet not all London critics swooned over McDonagh's exuberant mix of slapstick, irony, lyricism, and cruelty. "He knows just how to amuse an audience by putting up some deprived creature for humiliation and mockery," wrote Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard of The Cripple of Inishmaan.

The ease of McDonagh's arrival, together with his disdain for social orthodoxies, explains some of the critical reserve. There is perhaps a little envy surrounding McDonagh, who during the Evening Standard presentation was told to shut up by Sean Connery. McDonagh casually advised the actor to "fuck off' and then declared that, while Connery had made just one good film, he would make seven brilliant plays. Two down and five to go.

HENRY PORTER