Concrete Playground

There’s something disarming about 'irishness'. It has a geniality to it that speaks of the salt-of-the-earth everyman that every other man wants to have a pint of Guinness with. From the moment the first lilting, colloquial sample of dialogue is delivered in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, you’re instantly poised for a rollicking good time. And certainly, that’s what you start off getting; it’s only as the play progresses through the first act that sinister undertones begin to germinate and a compelling psychological dimension reveals itself.

Set in 1989 in a small village in Galway County, Ireland, the play zooms in on the dysfunctional relationship between Maureen (Mandy McElhinney), a sexually frustrated sole care-giver with a history of mental illness, and Mag (Judi Farr), her cantankerous elderly mother. Written by renowned Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (who was actually born in London) at the ripe old age of 25, The Beauty Queen of Leenane has played to audiences around the globe since it was first performed in 1996. The writing is both subtle and bold in style. The brash, hearty Irishness of it tempered with tense, loaded stillness. McDonagh toys with our sympathies and inverts our notions of victim, villain and hero as the psychological interplay between Maureen and Mag becomes all the more disturbing and complex.

In the Sydney Theatre Company’s production, director Cristabel Sved has taken an understated but gutsy approach, handling McDonagh’s nuanced material with expert finesse, allowing moments of comedy and tragedy to fluidly interlace. It certainly helps having a stellar cast, who each carry the material and the weight of a thick, drawling rural Irish accent with authentic ease. The two leads (Farr and McElhinney) deliver particularly strong performances, drawing you into their claustrophobic little world and not letting you out until the lights come up. The two male supporting actors (Darren Gilshenan and Eamon Farren) also deliver noteworthy performances, especially Farren who wears his character like a second skin, inhabiting entirely the adolescent affectation of Rae Dooley, the reluctant messenger. A quiet but integral player in the production is the detailed set design by William Bobbie Stewart, which effectively represents the stuffy, stagnant, insular world of Mag and Maureen — the ideal breeding ground for disease and dysfunction.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane promises to be “hilarious, cruel, irreverent, abandoned, constrained, horrific and, sometimes, all of these at once rubbing furiously together” and, without a moment's lapse, delivers in spades.

Image by Tracey Schramm.