The Sinking Of A Friendship

By Peter Debruge

It’s been nearly three decades since “In Bruges” writer-director Martin McDonagh decided to try his hand at writing for the theater, knocking out the first drafts of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” — a dark comedy so violent that the actors find them slipping in all the fake blood on stage — and “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” as well as five other plays, during an unthinkably prolific nine-month span.

He wrote like a man possessed during that time, channeling the words of the raging, salty-mouthed Irish characters he heard in his head. Once produced, six of those plays propelled McDonagh to international fame — and a decade later, an Oscar-winning filmmaking career. But he buried one of those first seven scripts, “The Banshees of Inisheer,” which was intended to round out his Aran Islands trilogy (in a 2006 profile for the New Yorker, he insisted that one simply “isn’t any good”).

Now, as McDonagh arrives at the Venice Film Festival with a similar-sounding film, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” he wants to make it clear: “I wrote it entirely anew three years ago, and it’s only the title that survived from way back when,” explains McDonagh, who liked the alliteration — the repeated “sh” sound in “Banshees” and “Inisherin” (emphasis on the third syllable)….