Beauty Queen of Leenane   
Lyric Hammersmith, London  
 

SET in the west of Ireland and first staged in 1996, Martin McDonagh’s Beauty Queen of Leenane centres around 40-year-old Maureen, angry and depressed at having to look after her manipulative, ailing mother as the rain falls ceaselessly outside their run-down home in Connemara.  

Momentarily Maureen’s drab isolation is relieved as she stumbles into a night of awkward romance with neighbour Pato, who has returned briefly from a labouring job in England.  

But when her selfish mother contrives to put the kybosh on their putative relationship, there are bitter consequences all round.   

It’s a brilliantly tense play, punctuated with humour and horror and at times so bleakly arresting that there are gasps from the audience.  

None of the characters are straightforward, and nothing is ever quite what it seems – so much so that even the warm glow of Maureen’s ancient range cooker begins to take on a sinister aspect.  

The all-Irish, four-person cast does a magnificent job with McDonagh’s excellent dialogue – as well as the meaningful silences injected by director Rachel O’Riordan.  

In a superb performance as Maureen, Orla Fitzgerald is simultaneously feisty and vulnerable as she dreams of “anything other than this,” while as mother Mag, complaining about her lumpy Complan and dumping the contents of her chamber pot into the kitchen sink, Ingrid Craigie is utterly convincing in her physical and spiritual representation of a desperate old woman trying to cling on to what little she has left.  

There’s a sadness, too, about Pato (played by Adam Best), whose eloquent understanding of Maureen’s difficulties is undermined by his dislocated personal circumstances and an inability to go out and grab what he wants.  

Only Pato’s rather simple yet strangely switched-on younger brother, Ray (Kwaku Fortune), seems to be above the fray. But like the others he too is bound by the constraints of living in a small, closed community, unable to break free.  

 While it’s no doubt possible to scale up that theme to identify a bigger thread to the play – taking Mag as the historically pernicious influence of Britain, for instance, and Maureen as an impatient Ireland trying to stretch away from its orbit – it’s more rewarding just to treat it as a compelling story of how cruelty begets cruelty, and of how the child becomes the parent.   

So strong is the content – and in this production, so strong is the presentation – that surely no other interpretation is needed.  

Peter Mason   

Runs until 6 November: https://lyric.co.uk