Martin McDonagh is the only playwright in the history of English theatre (after someone called William Shakespeare, whoever he was) to have four successful hits on Broadway and London’s West End concurrently. This was the early 2000s, when the world still had some faith that not everything worth watching was on YouTube. McDonagh’s plays were funny, visceral, angry, violent, cinematic, beautifully constructed and emotionally fulfilling. Naturally, the world was curious to know about this person. Where did he learn to write? What did he read? Did he enjoy a diet of cornflakes or red meat while these genius thoughts swirled in his brain? It must have taken him years to write all this? But he was only 30. Was he of noble literary stock? Did he steal? All the usual hype that surrounds success.
The facts, it turned out, were this.
McDonagh was a 30-year-old warehouse loader in London. He had read a few things, but not much. He came from a working-class background in Ireland. He wrote all the plays in one notebook, in one go, over six months in a tiny flat. He sent off the notebook to a theatre in Dublin and forgot about it. The night he finished all the plays, he went to a nightclub alone to celebrate — and had one beer. Two years later, he had won every glamorous theatre award. People magazine called him the “Sexiest playwright ever” (it’s not a very fought-over category, mainly because they made it up). He went on to write and direct a motion picture called In Bruges and was nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe. When asked about his playwriting, he said, “Whatever I had to say, I’ve said it in that notebook.”
When I mention this story to unpublished writer friends of mine abroad, the responses range from “True genius will always be discovered” to “a person only has so much to say in a lifetime”. When I mention this story to unpublished writer friends in India, the responses range from “Thank God for the warehousing job; otherwise he’d be screwed” to “so he must be rich and famous now. How much can you make from a hit on Broadway?”. And yet my unpublished writer friends abroad were in far less financially secure positions than my friends here.
It makes one wonder how we value the greatness of any kind of art here. The answer is relatively simple: money. A European art collector who is a regular on the local scene says that, at any Indian art fair or gallery opening, the conversation is entirely around who sold what and for how much. When a particular artist’s work is talked about, it is with a large generic sweep of phrase — “he is getting more ambitious” or “he takes great leaps with this show”. The thing in front of you could be a giant dinosaur made of beeswax trying to make love to a Bajaj Pulsar, but that isn’t the object of fascination. Its selling price is.
A prominent novelist added, “Any conversation about literature in India, in about 10 minutes, becomes a conversation about Chetan Bhagat. And then it goes into how famous and rich he is, and the relative merits and demerits of that.”
“Charles Dickens wasn’t famous just for being Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist, Uncle Scrooge, David Copperfield were equally famous,” he added. “However, in our literary festivals, I couldn’t name a single character from anyone’s book but everyone can tell you who got what advance to write it and why that’s unfair.” A Bollywood writer explained it to me: “See we are a trading people. We are not an intellectual people. That McDonagh guy’s stories sold, so he became someone.”
But what if, as my writer friends elsewhere had inquired, it wasn’t about selling or becoming anything? Fame and money are just by-products. Essentially, the method of evaluation of any art form seemed to ask different questions elsewhere — beginning, always, with what it was saying. Is it saying anything new? Controversial? Does it break new ground in existing genres? Does it change the world?
“No one cares,” he replied. “When I pitch a movie, I could sell a story of a ghost raping another ghost – which someone actually did – and no one will turn it down because it is about ghosts being raped. In Hollywood, yes, maybe someone would say, we are not into ghost rapes. But here, they would turn it down if the right talent wasn’t attached, but rarely for what the story was saying. I am sure your McDonagh guy knew what would sell.”
I tried to explain that McDonagh couldn’t have known anything would have happened to his plays once he sent them. He wasn’t an FMCG marketing executive; he was a playwright. If fame and money were his goal, he wouldn’t have stopped at the height of it.
“That was stupid. He should have kept going especially when he was on top” was the response.
“But what if he had nothing else to say?”
“As an artist, you can always say something, boss,” he insisted, proceeding to tell me a story of a hard-won negotiation for his latest screenplay. “What was your film about?” I enquired. “I can’t remember,” he replied, “but I got Rs 7 lakh.”
Pal’s latest play, The Bureaucrat, opens at Sophia Bhabha auditorium in Mumbai on Sunday
