THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE. To 23 March.

Newcastle-Under-Lyme

THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE: Martin McDonagh
New Vic: Tkts 01782 717962
Runs: 2h 30m, till 23 March 2002

Performances: Evenings at 7.30
Review: Rod Dungate, 9 March 2002

The play gives your system a severe jolt: Gwenda Hughes brings out all the play's teeth: great stuff indeed
Martin McDonagh's plays give your system a severe jolt. They are direct, funny, touching, humane, angry perhaps, ironic possibly and good. Gwenda Hughes, directing a talented cast of four in her intimate theatre-in-the-round, and delving deep into characters' relationships (as she always does) brings out all the teeth of McDonagh's emotional roller-coaster of a play, first performed in 1996.

This is a tragic tale of wasted lives: Maureen, stagnating in Ireland and knowing what she's missing, Pato, lonely, loving, living in alien lands, his brother Ray,, stagnating, incapable of doing anything about it and finally Maureen's selfish and self-centred mother. Maureen is victim of her mother, her mother victim of Maureen herself.

McDonagh's characters' language, like their lives, is filled with the flotsam and jetsam of other countries – England, America, Australia. McDonagh heightens the sense of dark realism by employing, in part, the language of the Irish plays we know from Yeats and Synge. It is as if he is trying to lay the ghost of a romanticised, twee Ireland with the inner brutality of his plays.

The four actors, working strongly as a team, ensure, the seething morass of sexual suppression, anger and sheer stir-craziness are always present. What happens in the story is sustained by these things – they poison and destroy the characters' lives.

Pauline O'Driscoll and Sean O'Callaghan (Maureen and Pato) are electrifying together, particularly in their first scene. They have come back from a party: you sense a sexual dams about to burst and the tension reaches out and grabs you by the throat. You will them to get their act together, but you know it will all end in worse than tears.

Hughes has directed with sensitivity and skill. By extracting everything she can from McDonagh's text, the production carries with it an all pervading and foreboding air of place. Great stuff indeed.

Cast:
Pato Dooley: Sean O'Callaghan
Maureen Folan: Pauline O'Driscoll
Ray Dooley: Vincent Patrick
Mag Folan: Tessa Worsley

Director: Gwenda Hughes
Design: Lis Evans
Sound: James Earls-Davis
Lighting: Daniella Beattie

2002-03-10 13:50:34