Irish-English playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh was born in London in 1970 and grew up in a blue-collar, working-class Irish family to parents who had immigrated for better job opportunities. However, they sustained their Irish roots and took their sons to visit Ireland every summer, and McDonagh maintains a dual visa. He saw his first professionally-produced play at age 14, David Mamet’s American Buffalo featuring Al Pacino. His older brother, John Michael McDonagh, dropped out of school at age 16 with dreams of becoming a writer, eventually moving to California and becoming a screenwriter. Martin McDonagh followed in his footsteps and dropped out with similar aspirations. He held jobs at a supermarket and as a part-time administrative assistant, sometimes collecting unemployment, and spent his free time reading, watching television, and writing stories, which he would sometimes send to film studios as proposals for short films.

In 1994, with no formal training or education, McDonagh wrote his first seven plays during a nine-month period. Six of the plays comprised two trilogies set in two different areas of coastal, small-town Ireland, where he visited with his family as a child. After many submissions and rejections from various theaters, his tenacity paid off. Galway’s Druid Theatre staged the debut production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), a dark comedy about an acidic relationship between a mother and her caretaker adult daughter that devolves into sabotage and violence.