Drawing on the framework of intermediality, this article investigates Martin McDonagh’s decision to embed Robert Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran within The Cripple of Inishmaan. Such an intertextual layering produces a dialogic encounter between theatre and cinema that dismantles Flaherty’s idealized vision of a harsh, primitive island existence in 1930s Ireland, substituting instead a sardonic, anti-romantic critique. McDonagh highlights the fractured familial relations, the peculiarities of the island community, and the absence of any natural harmony to construct a counter-perspective. This dramaturgical device of the ‘film-within-a-play’ operates ‘ekphrastically’, allowing the inserted text to breach the dramatic frame and open onto a liminal space – at once intermediary and unstable – between reality and representation. The article argues that this intermedial practice prompts spectators to interrogate both cinematic myth-making and theatrical narration, generating a hybrid aesthetic zone where stage and screen unsettle traditional dramatic forms and broaden the field of interpretation.
Jing et al. (Sat,) studied this question.