The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh. Sydney Theatre Company at The Playhouse, August 16 - 24.
This play, McDonagh's first, for which he received the English Evening Standard's Most Promising Playwright Award in 1996, comes to us with a very long pedigree going back to J.M.Synge's Playboy of the Western World (1907). Unfortunately, despite excellent design and an interesting use of slow motion in re-enacting moments of dramatic tension, and an especially compelling performance by Tracy Mann as Maureen, the play fails at its core where it is sentimental and predictable.
The story of a mother (Mag, played with horrible guile by Maggie Kirkpatrick) who does everything possible to prevent her only unmarried 40 year old daughter, Maureen, from escaping an obligation to provide her with full-time nursing care is potentially tragic. Maureen has one chance of getting out not only of the domestic situation but of Ireland entirely, if she can marry Pato Dooley (played without guile by Greg Saunders) and go to Boston; her failure leaves her insane, a mirror-image of her mother. Yet the play is too contrived, too neat, to match the horror of Synge and later Irish playwrights like Sean O'Casey and Brendan Behan. It has an old-fashioned feel compared with these writers' works - which belong to the first half of last century.
Too much is made of the traditional comic Irish loquaciousness - the very stereotyping of the Irish that Bernard Shaw complained of a century ago. It is only in the very last scene - where the comedy of Pato's younger brother Ray (almost a caricature by Ryan Johnson) rabbiting on about inconsequential inanities, is set against the tragic turning inwards towards mental breakdown which Maureen endures silently sitting in her mother's rocking chair - that a real strength of feeling is created. So much so, indeed, that Tracy Mann was still visibly affected during curtain call on Wednesday, where applause was enthusiastic for the performers, even if uncertain for the play.
Through most of the production, laughs were too shallow for the depths the play should have plumbed, while stylised devices - used to point the significant moments - were too obvious, leaving us floating on the surface instead of being drawn down into the undercurrents of emotion where we would have fully shared Maureen's sense of horror at the end, and would have felt more satisfied with our theatre experience.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
