Audacious debut still makes you shudder – 25 years on
The Beauty Queen of Leenane Minerva Theatre, Chichester
★★★★★
First seen in Galway – and hence in the Connemara region where it’s set – before transferring to the Royal Court, Martin Mcdonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane remains one of the most striking playwriting debuts of recent times.
Mcdonagh was just 25 at the 1996 premiere. Though part of a generational surge of talent, he stood out instantly as a consequence of his tight dramatic craftsmanship, audacious comic verve and storytelling flair.
The scenario itself: devilishly simple – a sniping old woman, near-housebound, and her daughter, entering middle-age and resentfully stuck in the role of carer, as the rain falls outside their remote backwater home. Critics were quick to spot antecedents – most notably Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. The writing also felt bracingly original, owing not least to the mix of youthful, politically incorrect irreverence and eerily mature insight.
Rachel O’riordan’s revival, 25 years on, affirms Beauty Queen’s status as a modern classic and attests to the way that line by line, the main characters are engaged in the mother of all psychological battles. The world of Ingrid Craigie’s Mag – matriarchally positioned in a rocking-chair – has shrunk to identifying, and criticising, the lumps in the watery Complan (food-supplement) that appears to be her diet, the odd biscuit aside.
A soul-sapping ingrate she may be, but there’s a courage to her stubborn discontent too: not only does the service afforded by Orla Fitzgerald’s Maureen come without a smile, it simmers with vengeful tendencies. The domestic tension reaches boiling-point via a sequence of events complicated by errant correspondence: there’s a rare party at which Maureen falls for local man Pato (a poignant Adam Best), who has been away in England and offers her a last-gasp dream of escape.
Amid the bleakly funny feast of mother-daughter micro-aggressions, including a hilarious running spat about a urine pong in the kitchen sink, the men resemble bemused interlopers. The quartet is completed by Pato’s brother Ray (an amiably restless Kwaku Fortune) whose smalltown mindset bolsters the play’s affectionate-satirical swipe at slow lives and barely swifter brains.
This is a masterclass in characteracting: Craigie a treasurable combination of wily schemer and daft old brush, Fitzgerald by turns venomous and vulnerable as her benighted daughter. Into what purgatories do we cast each other? Mcdonagh shows us – and makes us laugh, wince and shudder.