Martin McDonagh is a London-born Irish playwright whose first play The Beauty Queen of Leenane was the 1996 winner of the George Devine Award. It also won the Writer's Guild Award for Best Fringe Play and the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. The play was nominated for six Tony awards, of which it won four, and the Laurence Olivier Award. Since then McDonagh has gone on to write multiple smash-hit shows and films and win multiple awards including an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film for Six Shooter (2005), an Oscar nomination, a British Independent Film Award for best screenplay, an Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild Award for Best Film Script and a BAFTA for best original screenplay, all for In Bruges (starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, 2008), and a Laurence Olivier award for Best New Play for The Pillowman (won 2004).

Winner 1996 Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright; Winner 1996 George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright

For one week each autumn, Mick Dowd is hired to disinter the bones in certain sections of his local cemetery, to make way for new arrivals. As the time approaches for him to dig up those of his own late wife, strange rumours regarding his involvement in her sudden death seven years ago gradually begin to resurface.