The Beauty Queen of Leenane

The intriguing thing about Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane is how its utter predictability survives this intelligent Druid Theatre and Royal Court presentation. The transparencies of its plot are only slightly disguised by director Garry Hynes, who relies, understandably, on the strengths of her excellent cast to make this pastiche something more substantial than its text suggests.

Drawing with wicked delight from the theatrical stencils set by Synge, Keane and even Friel, The Beauty Queen of Leenane can be summarised as the lover, the letter and the poker. In a cottage in the west of Ireland an aging mother and her aging daughter live together in an atmosphere of unsuppressed resentment, occasionally animated as malevolence by one and violence by the other. A neighbour's party brings the possibility of a new life for the daughter; but then, wonders the mother, who will look after her?

It is, of course, the same old story; the important difference is the way Martin McDonagh tells it. His own gifts lie in the energy of brazen characterisation and an anarchic comic freedom. Good lighting from Ben Ormorod explores the puzzle of Francis O'Connor's tip-head set and the cracking pace is controlled by the marvellous phrasing with which Anna Manahan tweaks the mother's complaints into comedy. As the inefficient lovers Kate Burton and Peter Gowen overcome McDonagh's laboured language, and Ruaidhri Conroy's Ray, shifting that same burdensome speech pattern into a comic feature in itself, is little short of magic.

The Beauty Queen Of Leenane continues at The Opera House in Cork until Saturday (to book phone 021-274308) and opens at the Gaiety in Dublin on Tuesday, February 22nd .