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 story between the 40 year old virgin and the hungered returning neighbour. Through broad and outlandish performances he weaves a vile undercurrent into the story, the humour grounds the proceedings, it’s always entertaining, but with staunch freshness retains its tone even after the inevitable horror. Those who have seen his previous work will be aware of early third act atrocities.
Rosaleen Linehan playing Mag is richly fierce, she oozes the lazy awkward guilt of an elderly matriarch, wrenching all unconditional love from a tired daughter, played by Derbhle Crotty, in the lighter moments shining with a reverence and poise that equals Rosaleen’s Mag, which being the lesser part is arguably the more difficult one. Frank Laverty is an elegantly lonely man especially in his tender moments, reverberating best with the audience during a one on one face-off midway through the second act. It’s only Johnny Ward who fails as Ray, the younger brother, whose idea of acting is loud broad and stamping. It’s grating and often reduces important scenes to idiocy.
Seeing this play with different cultures would refine the idea of the humour immensely. The older audience members, which for this performance were modestly speaking 75% of the crowd, largely seemed to completely misinterpret the humour as comic, often slapstick. It’s written for an international audience by someone who understands the Irish tendencies with family, emotion and malice, but like Ken Loach with “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” it takes an outsider (Martin McDonagh is from London with Irish parents) to best attack the horror of quiet, incestuous country communities. It’s a simple, stark Coen-esque tale that’s viciously funny and enormously entertaining.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is running nightly at The Gaiety Theatre until June 4th.
