Before encountering A Skull in Connemara, I had never heard of grave exhumation, the job of Skull’s protagonist, Mick Dowd. In the play, Leenane’s cemetery is short on space, so Dowd must dig up the old dead to make room for new corpses. The practice seemed grotesque and horrific, even unbelievable. Since McDonagh is known for dabbling in surrealism, creating worlds with larger-than-life characters who follow twisted logic,
I assumed Dowd’s job was a fabrication. I thought, “surely, people don’t actually exhume bodies once they’ve been laid to rest, do they?”

Yep, they do. Turns out grave exhumation has a long, fascinating history that traverses continents, spans centuries, and continues today. There are many exhumation stories worth telling, but those that sound the most like Skull’s—the most tonally, situationally, and philosophically similar—all took place in pre-Enlightenment urban Europe. At that time, it was common to bury bodies near or even under churches, in the hope that the sacred ground would rub off on souls and help their chances at the Gates of Heaven. Combine this with a growing lack of space in cities, and they had a real problem on their hands: church floors began to rise as bodies built up underneath, and the smell of decay began wafting through the floorboards, which did little to improve church attendance. There are even tales of cemeteries becoming so overcrowded that the walls burst under
the pressure, spilling bodies into the church and neighboring basements.

For a time, church officials attempted to solve the problem by secretly removing some bones from graves, and depositing them in ossuaries—buildings that essentially serve as bone dumps. At one point in Paris, six million bodies were removed from graveyards and placed in quarries outside the city limits. Workers operated by night, filling carts with remains and pushing them through the streets, followed by prayer-intoning priests. Passersby helped by picking up bones that fell off the cart on the way.

It should be noted that mass grave exhumations still take place today, just in a more organized fashion. Necropolis is a London company that has been providing funereal and exhumation services since 1852. They exhume roughly 15,000 bodies per year, for every reason from city park development to forensics cases. It is, apparently, a highly competitive and lucrative industry. Further, should you decide to exhume an Irish body, the Irish government provides clear, easily accessible exhumation regulations online. There you will find a list of situations in which a grave may be exhumed, including “for public health reasons (e.g. if a graveyard or cemetery is being moved).” If they were so inclined, the citizens of Leenane could certainly claim this as the reason for their exhuming antics.

Perhaps it is this lack of bureaucracy—this absence of paperwork, corporate companies, and regulated procedure—that makes Mick’s work in Skull feel so otherworldly, so unimaginable to me. Maybe if Mick were wearing a sanitation suit and protective goggles I would feel less perturbed. Without them, the scenario acquires a rawness that affects me much more than any realistic depiction might have done. It is an aspect of McDonagh’s technique: to take reality and warp it slightly, revealing the truth underneath. They say the truth isn’t always easy; in this case, it’s downright icky. So don’t be surprised if, like me, you squirm during its unearthing.