Play Review The Beauty Queen of Leenane

The Beauty Queen of Leenane  by Martin McDonagh at the Rogue Theatre was definitely not another episode of Celtic Woman,  but this production has softened the show a bit over the ten years since I saw it last. Another explanation is we have become more accustomed to rapid shifts from comic bickering to abject terror in contemporary drama.  Director Christopher Johnson signals early in his program notes that the play is “a folk tale about the impact of scarcity on the human condition.”  Yet I see little visually or in the characters to support this contention.  Some actions in the show still turn the stomach-- witness the gasps as Mag pours her chamber pot into the kitchen sink, but overall some of the edges have been blurred.

The set is not as dark, depressing, cluttered, and seedy as in the earlier production I referred to. The filthy electric stove was the only item that keyed the disarray brought on by years of scarcity. The rest of the environment was too clean and neat as a pin. A minor quibble was that the electric kettle on the stove seemed too fresh and new and was used constantly and never refilled.

The characters in the Rogue production also seemed softer. Ray was funnier than I remembered and the women seemed to be pretty energetic in spite of appearing to live on lumpy porridge and stale biscuits. We certainly got to spite in spades, but we might have signaled it better earlier.  As I said to the wife.  The first time we saw it, it was raw and nasty; now it was still shocking but we were encouraged to think with a bit more sympathy about the complexity of the characters.

The fact that we are encouraged to search for motivations may be what director Christopher Johnson was looking for. On the other hand McDonagh gives us so little information about  what caused this horror and no apparent reason why Maureen was not tried and incarcerated  that  I think the playwright has played us a bit false.  Ultimately I have to conclude that both women are crazy as loons and I’m not sure that I want to stay interested. I am perfectly aware that some actions, even matricide, do not give up reasons easily, but McDonagh is not writing in the mode of Beckett.  It is a work couched in surface realism and the director has admitted to this by giving it a realistic setting and stating that the show resisted the kind of imaginative treatment that highlighted the recent  Rogue production of Moby Dick.

Ultimately I glory in a foursome of grand performances by Holly Griffith, Cynthia Meier, Ryan Parker, and Hunter Hnat, but confess that I did not fall in love with the play this time either. That doesn’t mean that I prefer the Celtic Woman.

 

A final note.  I loved the Program Cover Helga painting by Andrew Wyeth even though the identifiable portrait of a German model who probably had a relationship with the painter to represent the Irish leading character who had only two kisses in her life was a bit odd.