The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays

Sure, he's a clever storyteller. He fills each of these plays with a witty, self-propelled dialogue, the kind of patter actors love. There's a naughty schoolboy delight in the language. The dialogue is funny and ironic, but often repetitive and monotonous. And, at the end of the day, these plays don't offer much beneath the surface sheen.

Beauty Queen, for example, is about a woman approacing middle-age who, to protect the illusion of her last chance at love, tortures her poor old mum. Knee-jerk theatricality, if you ask me. Where's the insight? the passion? the outrage? In Cripple of Inishmaan, which is not in this collection, but was produced repeatedly in the US a season or so ago, is a larger play that contains the same kind of banter spread among more characters. It's exceptionally hard to make it work in production, mainly because McDonagh substitutes events for action. The play gives a mixed message to the audience, daring you to like the characters but constantly reminding you that the author is ridiculing them.

Of the three McDonagh plays I've seen, the one I thought was most successful was The Lonesome West, which functions on a level much like the others, but has the virtue of being outrageously funny all the way through. Perhaps McDonagh has more invested personally in the sibling rivalry premise: the story rings a little truer and he seems better able to stretch the blarney into a two hour play.

Talented, yes. Prodigy, no. Time will tell whether this angry young man will grow up to be a playwright.


Not for the feint of heart   May 31, 2006
Justin Mclaughlin (Minturn, CO United States)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

The best way to sum up Martin McDonagh? Quentin Tarantino meets Edward Albee. All three of these plays, also known as the Leenane trilogy, have several things in common: (1) violence (2) black humor (3) grotesque characters and (4) did I mention violence. Like Tarantino, McDonagh's use of violence is mostly humorous. When Maureen smashes her old mothers head with a fire poker, we laugh. We laugh because the poker has been conversed about at great length, about how it would make a supreme weapon. It displays the Chekov adage perfectly - if you show a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it better go off in the third. We also laugh because Muareen and her mother are so nasty, so disgusting and despicable that one of them deserves a sweet release. But not all the characters die - some are beaten with shovels, others crashed into walls, others have their heads shot off: and somehow they return, bloodied, confused, but alive, as stupid and indestructible as ever. And at times the violence is not funny, but chillingly cold - like when Maureen burns her mother's hand in boiling oil. We are caught in between, as our laughs melt into gasps.

Juxtaposed to all this violence is an attention to the prosaic. In an instant the characters can go from arguing about the merits of different brands of potato crisps to pointing a gun at one another's head. Very Tarantinoesque. Think of Vince and Jules tucking their guns into their shorts as they leave the diner in their "dork" t-shirts at the end of Pulp Fiction. One of McDonagh's characters blows off his father's head because he makes fun of his haircut. Sure, all this is funny, but I think McDonagh is also trying to show the petty, ignorant absurdity that is the human condition. Like Edward Albee there is a lot of witty repartee between the characters. They use esoteric words like "maudlin" that belie their boorish ignorance. Two of the brothers call one another "virgin gayboys." I don't know, but there is something funny about brothers calling one another "virgin gayboys." Not far from the way so many of the brothers I knew growing up talked to one another. The construction of the narratives are tight, dramatic, usually with sharp twist at the end. I've heard it before, and it was written in the New Yorker, that McDonagh is finished with play writing. So be it. But if Six Shooter is a sign of where he plans to go with film in the future, rest assured we will be entertained.



Peasant chic.   June 1, 1999
4 out of 17 found this review helpful

Who would have believed that this absurd melodrama would have garnered such critical plaudits? It's reads like Psycho meets Darby O'Gill. No one in Ireland talks like the people in this play "do be talking". Utterly offensive nonsense.