Some people are never satisfied. The Young Vic, having rebuilt its leaky old building a few years ago, is now recreating the drizzly Connemara weather inside the theatre at vast expense. Thousands of gallons of Irish water (perhaps I exaggerate slightly) have been imported and the auditorium reshaped to make sure no audience member gets inside without being dripped on from a complicated system of pipes and plastic sheeting.
But it's well worth being dripped on to see this production of Martin McDonagh's 1996 first hit play The Beauty Queen of Leenane. I missed this revival last year, but after touring Ireland it's back on the South Bank with the same superb cast of four. Derbhle Crotty plays Maureen Folan, a 40-year-old spinster who lives with her domineering mother in a remote Connemara village. Frank Laverty plays Pato Dooley, the man with whom she has a fling during one of his brief visits home from his work on English building sites. Johnny Ward is his younger brother Ray, a mostly unreliable go-between, and Rosaleen Linehan is the Mag, the mother from hell, determined to thwart her daughter's only chance of happiness. This is a brilliant ensemble who have been with the production long enough to have developed a superb sense of timing; McDonagh's sometimes outrageous lines of dialogue are delivered with crisp precision to maximum effect. Maureen and Mag discuss what might happen if a murderer from Dublin came to Leenane:
Mag (pause) Sure why would he be coming all this way out from Dublin? He'd just be going out of his way.
Maureen For the pleasure of me company he'd come. Killing you, it'd just be a bonus for him.
Mag Killing YOU I bet he first would be.
Maureen I could live with that so long as I was sure he'd be clobbering you soon after.
McDonagh, unlike other well-known Irish playwrights, is London born and bred of Irish descent, which gives a unique quality of distance to his imagined version of Ireland in this and several subsequent plays. His Ireland is a mythical place where everything is taken to extremes, and the rhythms of Irish speech are exaggerated. But the people he creates are living breathing characters of great depth, and the tone -- very black comedy with a twist of violence -- is always consistent. No trace of false sentiment ever penetrates; the audience can identify completely with Maureen's doomed quest for romance without having to like her or approve of everything she does. McDonagh is also a master of structure, knowing exactly how to lead the audience up the garden path and end the play with a dramatic twist. I rate him far more highly than other Irish playwrights such as Brian Friel, Conor McPherson and Sebastian Barry. So it's a pity -- for me at least, though probably not for him -- that he seems to have abandoned theatre for film.
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