London Irish Beauty

 

In an early plea for a vigorous multiculturalism, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan claimed that an influx of different cultures would energise the English language. More concerned with seeing the odd good play than a vision of socially integrated Britain, Tynan was as sick, in the late 1950s, as I am with stock Shakespeare. He went on to identify the Irish writing tradition as an example of how English literature had been enriched by “outsiders”.

In the programme notes for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh is placed in the Irish lineage of Yeates and The Gaelic League. This is not entirely justified. Just because he sets the play in a small Irish village and the characters say “feck” and discuss moving to England does not make McDonagh “The Quentin Tarantino of the Emerald Isle”. Born and bred in London, McDonagh’s Irish ancestry informs his use of dialect, but the issues he addresses are common to any rural area and his themes – disappointed romanticism, madness and intergenerational warfare – place him squarely within the British neo-brutalists like Saint Sarah Kane and the Generation X aesthetic, which justifies the Tarantino tag. But he also justifies Tynan’s claims about the importance of cultural dislocation leading to a more fluid and poetic use of language.

Even without the four strong performances at the heart of Tony Cownie’s production, this Beauty Queen is a stunner. Maureen Folan wants to leave her rural backwater, trapped by her ailing mother. Pato Dooley offers her escape. The inevitable destruction of her hopes has the sparse precision of a Greek tragedy, the mother a suitably vicious archetype while Maureen’s transformation into killer flows naturally from her repressed anger. McDonagh ensures that Maureen has our sympathy before revealing her violent nature, and the self-delusion and pity that infects both mother and daughter exposes the perpetual Darwinian struggle between our ambitions and our natures.

McDonagh does suffer from a screen-writer’s heavy-handedness: if a poker is picked up in act one, it will beat someone to death in act two. That Maureen has become her mother is overly sign-posted, and the brief allusions to Ireland’s relationship to England are blunt. More importantly, he has compassion for his anti-heroine’s plight, rounds her character and pitches her between insanity and thwarted desire. Her paramour, Pato, is, if anything, too kindly and sympathetic.

Beauty Queen has a plot that emerges naturally from the collision of location and character, punchy dialogue and a clear tragic direction: the Irish dialect sounds beautiful, but could be equally replaced with a West Country burr or American twang. The universality of frustration, of the battle between children and parents, between sex and duty: although McDonagh is popularly known for his film In Bruges, his ability to conjure a script makes him one of the most important playwrights in English. That it satisfied me as much as the elderly ladies with the Lyceum season tickets is clear evidence of something out of the ordinary.