The Beauty Queen of Leenane. A review.

When someone uses Kimberley biscuits and Complan as instruments of torture, you should be scared. Very scared indeed.

And by the time this run of 'The Beauty Queen of Leenane' by Kilcullen Drama Group closes, I expect that Siobhan Murphy, who plays Mag Foley in Martin McDonagh's west of Ireland tragedy, will never want to see either of those food items, or porridge, ever again.

'Beauty Queen' raises some laughs. But they are in most cases laughter of the nervous kind. Because the audience was drawn into this production by the Kilcullen group more than in any other play I have seen them do over many a year. The undercurrent of menace is made evident from the outset, and even in our Volvo leather seats we were very quickly uncomfortable.

Drama on stage generally depends on a continuity of conversation to keep things moving, in contrast to television where judicious use of close-up and panning, as well as music and other non-verbal techniques, can often power the narrative with few words. And there is that conversational flow in 'Beauty Queen'. But the play, and its interpretation by the Kilcullen group and its director Eilis Phillips, is often marked by silences which punctuate the dialogue more than usually. Silences which are carried wonderfully by the expressions presented by various of the players.



The plot is straightforward Irish rural relationships. Maureen, played by Eilis Phillips, is a single woman in her forties looking after her aged and hypochondriac mother Mag. They exist in a life of mutual dislike, even hate. Maureen gets a chance of a night's fling with neighbour Pato Dooley (Roy Thompson), from which comes the possibility of a romantic escape to America. But Mag is determined not to lose her skivvy daughter. Does she succeed? You'll have to go to find out.

Siobhan Murphy's performance as the mother which every mother in the country is deathly afraid of becoming is just a tour de force worthy of the best of Ireland's professional actors. Eilis Phillips gives us a brilliant range of projections, from the daughter soured by circumstance through the giddiness of a girl in love to the final, awful realisation that she has become her mother.

Always in such a play there is need for a messenger, a character in the middle who is not necessarily a principal of action. In 'Beauty Queen' this is Pato's brother Ray, played by Pat Cullen with an absolutely magnificent mix of doltish humour, throwaway misinterpretations, and almost-concealed compassion. Like Mag, his facial expressions and spatial interaction with the others are superbly presented.



Roy Thompson's Pato is surprisingly serious and gentle, a man of more soul than might be expected from a raw village of the west. But then, working in the anonymity and loneliness of English building sites will make you either that or a weekly payday drunken flotsam. His most powerful moments on stage are when writing to Maureen a missive which he knows may be of doomed hope.

Kilcullen Drama Group had powerful material in this play to begin with. But they have moved it on and made it their own in this production. It runs until next Thursday night, and if you haven't been, take the opportunity and book now.

There are unlikely to be extra performances. Siobhan Murphy simply couldn't possibly take the Kimberley, Complan or porridge even one night more than the scheduled run.

Brian Byrne.