Drama sails to seven islands

DRUID Theatre's 21 years of pushing out the theatrical boat have been marked by many surprises, many rapturous reviews, many extraordinary tours to venues in which no professional company dreamed of playing before.

This year's birthday tour with Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane was more ambitious than ever, covering seven island venues and seven mainland ones from Oilean Chleire in west Cork to Rathlin Island off the Antrim coast. It came to a triumphant finale in Leenane in Connemara on Saturday, with a moment of unexpected theatre.

The play is the stark and unsettling story of Maureen Folan, a 40-year-old virgin trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with Mag, her ageing and manipulative mother. Leavened with comic moments which arise from the petty tyrannies the women inflict on each other, it sucks the audience into complacency before delivering a killer punch at the end. The final scene forces the audience to confront the truth that what seemed hilarious earlier on is, after all, not so funny.

As such, the play had a special resonance with many of the local audiences it played to during the tour. Again and again, in the feedback cast and crew were given on their way up the western seaboard, people identified the play with certain dysfunctional relationships in their own areas. Then it came to Leenane and sitting in the front row - on a specially-reserved seat was the person believed locally to be the real "Queen" of Leenane, Bina McLoughlin.

Ms McLoughlin is one of those characters whose presence enriches many rural communities. She lives alone on a small cottage on the side of a hill near Leenane, with her flock of sheep and her other animals. She has had a hard life and is viewed with a certain amount of awe and respect in the local community. On Saturday night she dressed up for the play, putting on her long dress embroidered with Celtic designs and a bright red woollen hat, before making her way down to Leenane parish hall.

When the performance ended the audience stood, almost in unison, and gave the actors a thunderous ovation - par for the course during this tour. After a slight pause, Ms McLoughlin opened her arms wide in benediction, before rising to her feet and joining in the applause.

Outside the hall, she sought out Martin McDonagh to congratulate him for writing such a play. She told The Irish Times it "reminded me of nothing at all, but I thought it was one of the finest I ever saw". Half the audience was there because they thought the play was going to tell her story, she said. Then she laughed loudly and added, enigmatically, "mine is a lot harder".

THE Beauty Queen is transferring to the West End this week, where it opens for a short season next Monday at the Duke of York's, the temporary home of the Royal Court. The island venues have been particularly intense and intimate, with audiences up close and reactions in terms of laughter, exclamations or comments - freely given and immediate. On Arranmore island the locals were tickled pink that theirs was the only Donegal venue. On Inis Oirr they turned out in a howling gale, walking or travelling by tractor to pack the venue known simply as "An Halla".

The move to more restrained audiences for the play's second tour to London will be a big change: "There is a kind of a feeling, funnily enough, that London is the anticlimax to what has happened. It has been such an amazing tour. Even though it's the West End and all that, and there will be the first night glitz and all that, we're all not going: `Yeah - London!'," says actor Tom Murphy, who is wonderful in his bored-to-tears role in the play.

"London will be a big culture shock after this, says Anna Manahan who delivers a subtle and powerful performance as the manipulative Mag Folan. "I think we'll all be longing for the islands."

The play sold out everywhere it went, with the exception of Bangor Erris, where the first night clashed with an important Manchester United match. When the seats were full, standing places were sold off at a £1 throw in most of the venues these too sold out.

While these unusual venues added to the play's power, the reason for its success lies in the play itself. Like in atomic physics, where the act of observing a particle may change its nature, the Beauty Queen becomes a different play in different places.

Watching the play in Galway before the tour started, one is struck by the poignancy and starkness of the lives exposed on stage. The tone is serious, sombre. On Inis Mor, the audience laughs heartily at every misfortune, every minor cruelty - perhaps because the only other choice is to cry. The response comes from the gut, while in town it comes from the head. There is a point near the start of the play when Maureen turns up the radio. A song in Irish is playing, which Mag dismisses as "oul' nonsense". Viewed in Galway, the ensuing spat over the language seems laboured, as if the writer - born in London but whose father comes from Leitir Meallain - is trying to make some kind of didactic statement.

But in Halla Ronain on Inis Mor the perspective is different. At the back of the hall, a gaggle of teenagers chat in English during the first half of the play, pausing to giggle occasionally at the curses on stage. Half-way up the hail, an old man's face becomes animated with amusement as Mag voices a deeply-felt conviction, held in many Gaeltacht communities, that Irish is of no value. It is a feeling that is not often articulated openly in public, for fear of jeopardising the community's chances of getting any grants that might be going.

Now here is somebody on stage saying what many privately feel, and the audience is loving it. "Oh, `tis true, `tis true," chortles the old man, as Mag asks what use is Irish on a building site in London or Boston?

In Leenane, the audience is silent during the same scene. Perhaps it is an unwelcome reminder in an area where the decision to abandon Irish as a community language is still uncomfortably close. It is one of the many nuances in the response to the play that make touring such an enriching experience, not only for the people who get to see it but also for the company itself.

MAYBE this ability to make different meanings for different people is the secret of eternal youth, the reason that after 21 years Druid is still as fresh and as vital as ever. As artistic director Garry Hynes explains, the tour is both a continuation of a process which began in the early 1980s and an opportunity for renewal.

"In our 15 years of touring we have visited about 71 different venues," she says. "It's not just something we do after we do everything else. Touring has become central, not just to the strategic policy of the company but to the artistic policy as well.

"It's not a one-way thing where the theatre company goes to the community and brings something with it. You also get something back."