Review
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
Lyric Theatre, Belfast
Until July 1
OK, let’s examine why Martin McDonagh’s coruscating, utterly brilliant plays that address the human condition like an impossible, dangerous friend are always described as Tarantinoesque. It’s because they are harrowing yet funny, featuring characters often on the edge of violence.
Take Prime Cut’s co-production with the Lyric Theatre of The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
It involves a 40-year-old flaky and frustrated spinster, Maureen, carer to her difficult mother. There were elements of A Streetcar Named Desire, also maybe a female version of Steptoe and Son.
This is bleak, albeit humorous, territory, "As dark as midnight," as a fellow spectator put it with casual references to priests punching babies.
The Irish memes are, of course, all there. Starting with traditional diddley dee Irish music, upbeat in the face of the unfolding tragedy, Beauty Queen explores the constraint of a small community in a rather Brian Friel manner.
Dancing at Lughnasa, anyone, with Maureen (Nicky Harley, in a stunning performance) desperate for joy and escape in her proscribed existence. Ger Ryan as Mag is also five-star.
Yet their relationship, however awful it is (and over arguments about Complan lumps, the smell after the mammy empties her po into the sink each morning, it really is) is grim and familiar, almost a grotesque marriage. Both women are trapped.
Something has to change and in comes Pato, brilliantly acted by Caolan Byrne, potential salvation for Maureen who is needy while he is delightfully handy and could clearly love her. Emma Jordan’s direction shines here.
He comes up with her eponymous title and their love scene, after a send-off of some Americans, was both touching and funny.
McDonagh’s language is by turns lyrical, coarse (there is a nice passage about the phallic nature of shortbread, with Maureen making a point to her mother), savage, vernacular. These people are living lives of noisy, not quiet, desperation but there is tenderness too.
Pato’s delivery of his love letter to Maureen, asking her to join him in Boston, standing stage right under a spotlight, was moving. We sensed there might be a Thomas Hardy moment, i.e. lost or destroyed letters, and there was.
Brilliant Ray Dooley, younger brother of Pato, played so well by Marty Breen, was wooed throughout by daytime telly. He decided wrongly, and he knew it, to leave the key communication in an envelope with Maureen’s tough ma. Of course, she opened then burned it, as her daughter’s fulfilment spelled the end of her settled existence.
There are further horrors, a sadistic scalding and eventual death. We feared the poker, so wanted by young Ray to despatch the coppers "so you see the blood pour from them", might be deployed. The rain provided a kind of tearful accompaniment.
At the end, after Maureen’s further acute disappointment and exit, the rocking chair of her late mother picks up speed with nobody in it.
Ghostly, worrying, it was a fitting conclusion to a performance that stays with you after the applause.
