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The Beauty Queen Of Leenane (Modern Classics)

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Maureen Folan’s mother, Mag, meddles in Maureen’s first opportunity at a real relationship and ultimately pays for it with her life. McDonagh) offers all the familiar delights of farce and melodrama, while at the same time offering a powerful critique of contemporary Ireland. Martin McDonagh’s international hit had its premiere in 1996 but, in form, it could date from any time in the preceding century.

Maureen then emerges, dressed only in her underwear, and flaunts her intimacy with Pato in front of Mag.

This is bleak, albeit humorous, territory, "As dark as midnight," as a fellow spectator put it with casual references to priests punching babies. When Pato reads his letter to Maureen, speaking of his own loneliness and desire for connection, it is so powerfully performed by Best that it threatens to take the emotional focus away from the mother-daughter drama altogether. The 1999 production was a tour by the Royal Court Theatre Company, appearing at the Adelaide Festival Centre (May – June 1999) and Wharf 1 (July 1999) and directed by Garry Hynes. Rachel O’Riordan directs a major revival of this darkly comic, award-winning play by Martin McDonagh ( Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; The Lieutenant of Inishmore), starring Adam Best ( Giri/Haji), Ingrid Craigie ( Roadkill; The Cripple of Inishmaan), Orla Fitzgerald ( The Young Offenders) and Kwaku Fortune ( Line of Duty; Normal People). However, it soon becomes clear that Maureen imagined her reunion with Pato; he actually left by taxi without ever seeing Maureen, and is now engaged to a woman with whom he danced at the party.

With Cameron Tharma completing the quartet as Pato’s kid brother Ray, it makes for an evening as familiar as it is unsettling.He reveals that, although he has barely spoken to Maureen in 20 years of acquaintance, he has secretly thought of her as "the beauty queen of Leenane" for a long time. The romance between Pato and Maureen has a whiff of Tennessee Williams’s sexual yearning and dreams of escape, with some fine acting between Best and Fitzgerald. While Maureen is out, the Folan home is visited by Ray Dooley, a young man, who invites both women to a farewell party for his visiting American uncle. A Tony Award-winning dark comedy thriller, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, “crackles with emotional fire and the blackest of comedy that is both hilarious and horrific” ( The Guardian).

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