The Stage

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Published Thursday 22 July 2010 at 11:24 by Gerald Berkowitz

Those who know Martin McDonagh’s Lieutenant of Inishmore should be prepared for the mix of broad Irish comedy and grand guignol that characterises this 1996 play, which begins as light comedy and gradually morphs into black humour and then into total blackness, the playwright repeatedly surprising and shocking the audience with how very dark his vision is able to get.

In a dreary Irish village a middle-aged spinster lives with her elderly mother, the pair complaining and sniping at each other with the almost ritualistic quality that comes from having done this for years.

But then one goes beyond a joke and the other retaliates, and we watch with growing horror and increasingly uneasy laughter as they commit real crimes against each other, slipping ever closer to true madness in the process.

Joe Hill-Gibbins’ revival serves the playwright admirably, starting so lightly that the audience is lulled into a complacent expectation of predictable ethnic humour that makes the progressive shocks all the more powerful.

Rosaleen Linehan makes the mother a monster of passive-aggressive manipulation, her sharp eyes always alert to new opportunities to torment or frustrate her daughter.

Susan Lynch admirably navigates the more difficult role of the daughter, as she begins with all our sympathy and then takes her character on an unstoppable journey toward insanity.

In a couple of short scenes David Ganly captures our hearts as he establishes the daughter’s rough wooer as one of nature’s gentlemen, while Terence Keeley nicely rounds out a lad lucky enough to be too immersed in his own concerns to notice the horrors around him.

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