Theatre reviews: The Beauty Queen of Leenane/What we Know

Published on Wednesday 24 February 2010 18:04

THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE ***** ROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE, EDINBURGH WHAT WE KNOW *** TRAVERSE THEATRE, EDINBURGH

LAST SUMMER in Glasgow, in Oran Mor's lunchtime season of cut-down classics, the wonderful Cara Kelly created a Medea to remember in just 30 minutes flat, capturing all the charisma and cruelty of drama's greatest female killer with an intensity that left audiences gasping. And now she seizes her chance to do all that and more again, in a Royal Lyceum production of Martin McDonagh's youthful masterpiece The Beauty Queen Of Leenane that drew a rare standing ovation from the usually reserved Lyceum audience at the weekend, so perfectly does it capture the brilliant structural and linguistic rhythms, and underlying emotional truth, of McDonagh's remarkable play.

First seen in Galway and London in 1996-97, and written by the (then) 26-year-old wild child of a London Irish family who used to send their son back to Connemara for the summer, The Beauty Queen is the first play in McDonagh's Leenane Trilogy, and has often been understood as a deliberate pastiche on the great tradition of drama about the intense boredom, sexual frustration and latent violence of a once-idealised Irish rural life. McDonagh certainly adopts and uses the superbly comic cadences of JM Synge's highly-wrought Irish English, although with a hair-raising postmodern twist. And his story – about clever and frustrated 40-year-old Maureen Folan and her bad old bitch of a mother, Mag, who keeps her tied down to their bleak Connemara cottage by fair means or foul – is a classic Irish rural melodrama of glimpsed happiness, missed chances, and an embittered older generation determined to destroy the erotic happiness of the young; the spirits of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Tom McIntyre walk this stage, along with that of Synge.

Yet it's fair to say that not one of those playwrights – perhaps even including Synge – has ever created a play so perfectly shaped, and so weightlessly dynamic in its dramatic evolution, that it almost literally keeps audiences on the edge of their seats for two lightning-swift hours, while simultaneously doing full justice to the clock-ticking tedium of Maureen's life with Mag, and to the breathtaking glimpse of possible happiness brought to her door by young Ray Dooley, the flawed teenage messenger from a nearby farm, and Ray's bachelor uncle Pato, back from England, and still smitten with Maureen.

And it's also fair to say that this beautifully made play, with its growing intimations of underlying violence and tragedy, can rarely have been better served than by Tony Cownie's exquisitely chosen cast for this Lyceum production, who grasp the rhythm, detail and meaning of the text with a pitch-perfect eloquence that makes the show a joy to experience.

Kelly is magnificent as a sharp-witted, driven, and charismatic Maureen, full of love and sensuality just aching for expression, but also psychologically bound to her destructive relationship with her mother, with its chilling undertones of submerged cruelty. John Kazek and Dylan Kennedy are unforgettable as the two menfolk, Pato poignant in his feeling for Maureen and his brave bid for happiness, Ray hilarious in his fatally dismissive monologues of Irish teenage angst, in the age just before the coming of the Celtic tiger. Janet Bird's fine set maroons Maureen's cluttered kitchen in a bleak world of boggy hillside and rain.

And somewhere behind all the laughter and melodrama, and sheer gasping tension, there is a great truth about the sweetness and horror of human nature; about our huge potential for joy, connection, even ecstasy, and about the dark hidden savagery of which we become capable when poverty, politics and belief – or just time and circumstance – dictate that our hopes must be denied, and our potential unfulfilled. The great Quebecois playwright Michel Tremblay once remarked that the more one is local, the more one is universal; and McDonagh's plays certainly draw a huge energy and vividness from his deep connection with the language and literature of Ireland's far west.

Pamela Carter's What We Know at the Traverse, by contrast, is one of those modern urban middle-class dramas that really could be set anywhere, from Tokyo to Tollcross; and it seems, by comparison, a pretty colourless and self-absorbed affair. Set in the well-equipped kitchen of a neutral and – to judge by their conversation – entirely vacuous young couple called Lucy and Jo, this 80-minute play messes with our heads for an hour before making it clear that it is about Lucy's shocked response to bereavement, after Jo's sudden death from a brain haemorrhage. It therefore joins a long series of none-too-memorable contemporary shows – including Suspect Culture's Static and Vox Motus's Bright Black – in which the current generation of under-40s gaze in solipsistic shock at the truth that like every generation before them, they are mortal.

What We Know benefits – like The Beauty Queen Of Leenane – from another fine central female performance, from Kate Dickie as the bereaved Lucy; and she receives excellent support from Anne Lacey, Robin Laing and Pauline Lockhart as the guests in the play's final and most successful dinner party scene, which should perhaps have been Carter's starting point. But, by and large, the language of the play is dispiritingly flat, and its dramatic dynamism non-existent. My own hunch is that this obsession with the sudden absence of partners has more to do with the rootless fragility of modern relationships, and the trauma of rejection, than it has with the fact of bereavement. But that only makes the use of death as a metaphor for loss the more questionable, in its easy hyping-up of emotion; and the more dramatically distracting and ineffective, as the point around which to build a play.

&#149 The Beauty Queen of Leenane continues until 13 March, What We Know until Saturday.