The Intertextual Presence of Samuel Beckett's All That Fall in Martin McDonagh's Six Shooter

Abstract

As many critics have pointed out, Martin McDonagh's work for the stage and screen is deeply indebted to the drama of Samuel Beckett. While critics have spotted most of McDonagh's intertextual debts to Beckett, they have curiously failed to recognise that his Oscar-winning short film, Six Shooter (2004), draws heavily on Beckett's classic radio play, All That Fall (1957). As Julia Kristeva contends, intertextuality always involves the ‘absorption and transformation’ of the earlier text. There is much evidence of Six Shooter's ‘absorption’ of All That Fall: both works centrally feature trains, the death of young children, childless couples, animals, reflections on Christianity, and haunting Irish memories which inspire bizarre and, indeed, violent behaviour in the present. With regards to ‘transformation’, McDonagh's film challenges and updates the reflections on Christianity, adult-child relationships, and Dublin found in Beckett's play, and McDonagh uses the visual medium of film to extend the unexploited ‘performativity’ of Beckett's earlier, audio work.