A new force from Galway again

AS WELL as being one of the most auspicious debuts by an Irish playwright in the past 25 years, Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, which opened last week at the new Town Hall Theatre in Galway is also the most intriguing Anglo Irish fusion since Jack Charlton first pulled on a green tracksuit.

In it, Harold Pinter and Joe Orton blend seamlessly with Tom Murphy and John B. Keane to create a vibrantly original mixture of absurd comedy and cruel melodrama. McDonagh's London Irish background allows him to hold in perfect tension an extraordinary range of elements from both sides of the Irish Sea.

As in Pinter, everyday banality acquires sinister undertones. As in Orton, mundane speech is bent into outrageous shapes without ever losing its demotic feel. But there is also a dark comedy of yearning and despair reminiscent of Murphy, and a situation - a 40 year old spinster trapped with a monstrous old woman in a remote house in the West - that echoes his great play Bailegangaire.

There is a wildly melodramatic plot of which the early John B. Keane might have been proud. And all of this is held together with an utterly 1990s sensibility, in which knowing and playful pastiche becomes indistinguishable from serious and sober intent.

The mixture of elements makes sense because the country in which McDonagh's play is set is pre modern and post modern at the same time. The 1950s is laid over the 1990s, giving the play's apparent realism the ghostly, dizzying feel of a superimposed photograph. All the elements that make up the picture are real, but their combined effect is one that questions the very idea of reality.

One of the superimposed pictures is a black and white still from an Abbey play of the 1950s West of Ireland virgins and London building sites, tyrannical mothers and returned Yanks. In it, Marie Mullen's Maureen lives with her terrible mother (Anna Manahan) in a house up a Connemara hill. A meeting with Pato, a local man back on holiday from the building sites (Brian F. O'Byrne) holds out the promise of happiness that you know from the start will be destroyed by the mother.

But the other picture is a lurid Polaroid of a post modern landscape, a disintegrating place somewhere between London and Boston, saturated in Irish rain and Australian soaps, a place in which it is hard to remember anyone's name, in which news of murders floats in through the television screen, in which the blurring of personal identities makes the line between the real and the unreal dangerously thin. And behind theme garish colours, there are shadows in which madness and violence lurk, waiting to emerge.

Looking at both pictures at the same time, you experience a series of double takes. You are drawn into the comfortable, melodramatic rush of the plot, knowing all the time that it is taking you to places you don't want to go, wondering why conversations keep throwing up images of violence and death, wondering why Maureen's party dress looks as if it could be for a funeral as well as a hooley. You find yourself in two minds most of the time.

And as the real and the unreal become, for Maureen, increasingly hard to tell apart, the whole idea of theatrical realism becomes itself the biggest double take of all. The conventions of domestic drama are at once followed and parodied. The kitchen sink is present and prominent, but only to provide a pungent running gag. The domestic details - Kimberly biscuits, lumpy Complan - that are meant to provide a "realistic" backdrop to the action are instead pushed relentlessly into the foreground by McDonagh's brilliant dialogue. And the domestic appliances that dominate Francis O'Connor's - subtle set become gradually less cosy and more sinister, as objects like the cooker, the cooking oil and the poker become portents of violence and cruelty.

All of this is accomplished with an assurance astonishing in a first play. There is just one scene, dictated by the need to tell the audience the contents of a crucial letter from Pato to Maureen, where the stylistic integrity of the piece is broken. But what is really important is that McDonagh is more than just a very clever theatrical stylist. His tricks and turns have a purpose. They are bridges over a deep pit of sympathy and sorrow, illuminated by a tragic vision of stunned and frustrated lives, that makes any comparison with Quentin Tarantino, prompted by outward similarities of violence and language, merely superficial.

And in Garry Hynes's superb production, perfectly pitched between the comic and the grotesque, it is Marie Mullen who embodies that vision. In one of her finest performances, Mullen combines a minute sense of detail in her movements and expressions with the ability to suggest all the time that those details don't ever add up to a stable whole. Her Maureen is now girlish, now old, now vulnerable, now cruel, now warm, now cold a bundle of tentative possibilities in search of a personality. With the disciplined, assured work of Manahan, O'Byrne and Tom Murphy as Palo's brother Ray around her, she forms the broken heart of the play's clever games of form and meaning.

In his stunning final scene, McDonagh brings together the trivial and the tragic, an ascent into the heights of loopiness and a descent into the depths of despair. The effect is hysterical, in both senses - wildly funny in its incongruity, crushingly bleak in its madness and deeply unsettling. And as it starts to sink in, you realise that a new force has hit Irish theatre.