The Beauty Queen of Leenane is Martin McDonagh’s first produced play and the first part of his Leenane trilogy. It’s a lot of firsts really, it began his career, performed by the Druid Theatre Company in Galway in 1996, before moving to Broadway via the West End. Leenane is unforgivingly brutal and quite a humbling experience. It follows the lives of Maureen Fallon (Derbhle Crotty), her mother Mag (Rosaleen Linehan), and two local brothers, one returning from England circa 1987. Maureen, a modest woman approaching 40 with little life experience, shares a cottage in remote Leenane with her gauche, torturous mother whose lazy manipulation grates on even the most gracious of guests. The story, although predictable, is more fable than lazy. It is familiar in the sense that McDonagh is using an obvious plot to lull the audience into his reality by first setting up a romantic ideal, a love … There’s more →