Review of Loft Theatre Company production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane (2009)

NB The following is a combined review of The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Pillowman which were presented in repertoire.

This unique coupling of plays by one of Europe’s foremost modern writers sets an extraordinary challenge for a local theatre.

Apart from the practicalities of daily set changes, the company faces the task of exploring Martin McDonagh’s searing insight into the perverse effects of guilt and mental corruption. Both productions admirably pitch the delicate balance between fairytale and nightmare, absurdity and brutality.

Gus MacDonald directs Beauty Queen at a slow-burn pace which allows the initially comic relationship between middle-aged Maureen and her hag-like mother to fester into a fearsome clash of wills and a constantly changing slant on which is the true victim in their remote Irish cottage.

There is something of a Steptoe nastiness to Wendy Morris’s aged, porridge-supping crone, brilliantly realised, while Mary MacDonald skilfully embodies a range of potentially damaging frustrations as Maureen. Bluff normality breezes in with Tom O’Connor’s good guy Pato.

While violence mainly simmers here, it explodes across the stage in Pillowman, where director Gordon Vallins evokes the not unfamiliar theme of a man taunted and tortured by accusers for a crime he does not understand.

Shades of Kafka, of course, but we are whisked, through superbly delivered narratives and a wickedly funny piece of filmed story-telling, into the darkest corners of a person’s mind.

Once again the author’s intention to make us laugh one minute and recoil in shock the next is beautifully achieved through the play’s subtle treatment.

And again the performances are terrific – David Pinner as the hapless prisoner, Michael Barker as his retarded brother, Bob Harper’s droll, avuncular and deadly chief policeman.

The two productions represent non-professional theatre at its finest.

The word ‘amateur’ must remain at the village hall.

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Peter McGarry is an experienced, independent professional theatre critic who has agreed to review Loft Theatre Company productions.

The agreement with the Loft is that Peter is free to express his opinions for good or ill. The Loft Theatre Company has no control whatsoever over the content of these reviews and will never comment publicly on what he writes.