The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin Ends June 4 30 0818-719388 gaietytheatre.ie

How seriously should we take Martin McDonagh? Many of us won’t get past the 10th line of his first play before abandoning the effort: “You do make my Complan nice and smooth,” the passive-

aggressive Mag tells her frustrated spinster daughter Maureen. “Not a lump at all, not the comrade of a lump.” Others have always taken his corkscrew Connemara syntax, cartoonish violence and detailed conversations about supermarket products as the sign of a considered playwright.

The Young Vic’s enjoyable production has it both ways, treating the play’s gruesome comedy and dismal circumstance with equal attention, with barely a lump in director Joe Hill-Gibbons’s mixture. Nor, for the largest part, its comrade.

The charge made against Derbhle Crotty’s fragile character is that she can’t “tell the differ, what’s true and what’s not”, and the production takes its lead from her. The set is somewhere between grim realism and looming abstraction, the lights both functional and expressive; even the radio static is sneakily in tune with a comedy of disturbance. Rosaleen Linehan steals the show with similar focus, giving the shallowest of lines or actions an anchoring intention. Performances this good don’t come from nowhere, but ultimately the play’s glib plotting and undermining twists are against them. Could it be that the play doesn’t want that much attention?

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