The Beauty Queen of Leenane

 This is the hottest I've ever been in the theatre. I don't mean I'm looking great - though I am - I mean it's sweltering. I am sweating cobs here. The half hour walk from the City Centre, all uphill mind, on the hottest day of the year so far, has not helped. I drink a cooling glass of wine and stick to the chair, the table, to anything I come into contact with. I could get the dog hairs off your jumper. The Lyric is a bit of a bugger to get to from where I live, but then everything in Belfast is inconveniently located as a matter of civic pride. There is no easy here. 

I'm here to see the play The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh's heap-spoon helping of Irish Gothic. I know nothing about the play and that's the way I like it. When I reviewed plays for coin, I felt a modest responsibility to do some research, get the correct spellings of people's names, maybe a little light investigation of the Theatre Company's history, or perhaps something that the playwright had written before. I'm old fashioned that way. Today I'm going in blind. It'll be a completely new experience, unfolding in front of me like a map of some strange foreign land. I like the mystery, the feeling that anything could happen. 

I do know the Theatre Company, Prime Cut. And I do know the lead, Nicky Harley. And, of course, Martin McDonagh wrote The Banshees of Inisherin and won an Oscar for it, so everybody knows him. But the story? That could be anything. 

The set is beautiful. Ciaran Bagnell, always great, has excelled himself here. An inside-out house, rain pouring beyond the blasted, blackened roof timbers. The awful energies of the inhabitants have exploded this house. We are in a bare, barely functional kitchen, a sink "with a smell off it". Over by the fire, a rocking chair. A radio chirrups like an ailing bird. A door leads to a rumour of the world beyond, but the two people in the house see no further than the chicken coop. They are Mag Folan (Ger Ryan) an old woman with a burnt hand and no off switch, and Maureen (Nicky Harley) her forty year old virgin daughter, who bickers and complains about her mother's incessant barked orders, but mostly complies. "A blessed skivvy, I am." 

It's a sit-com. Two trapped characters in a ruinous crater tearing strips off each, a dysfunctional family romance, love and hate confused, spliced, plaited together. It's "Steptoe and Daughter". But it's a sit-com written by McDonagh, so it goes deeper, darker, and uglier. We're into sit-trag territory. 

This is a very funny play. When Mag tells Maureen about a poor old woman in Dublin murdered by a man "and he didn't know her", Maureen tells her "I suppose you'd never be dying, hanging around forever just to spite me." Marty Breen's Ray Dooley is all comedy, even as the character serves the plot. Ray is that sit-com staple: the nosy neighbour, always popping by for a snoop and a gossip. The sublime inversion here is that Ray hates being in the house and can't wait to get away, unless there are Australian soaps on the TV. A large part of the story pivots on Mag knowing Ray's desperate to leave, despite vowing to place a letter in Maureen's hand. The story is deceptively simple, but plot-strands are so neatly buried in the text that nothing feels contrived. It works beautifully. The anticipation of horrors to come are as much a part of the show as the call-backs or the subtle shades of character. 

The cast acquit themselves wonderfully. Marty Breen's Ray Dooley is a riot of teenage disaffection, reeling with horror at the smelly old woman and her badly dressed daughter, flapping like a wounded gull in a German Army jacket, only subdued by the opening theme of "Sons and Daughters". Ray's brother Pato, (Caolan Byrne) is a likable if not especially bright digger of roads in that England - a barbarising horror overseas, where he is reviled for his Irishness and is forced to drink his pints alone. His genuine attraction for Maureen transforms her, and this is a threat to the indentured servitude Mag has come to rely on. Byrne's beautifully performed reading of Pato's letter to Maureen at the outset of the second half, is a moment of pure sweetness, in a play about cruelty and depression. It's like a crack in the clouds. But a darker storm is brewing. 

Ger Ryan's Mag is a monster. Ignorant, malicious, narrow and sly, she sits in her rocking chair demanding her Complan be stirred, but is only stirred into action when her daughter has a chance at real happiness. And she pisses in the sink! It's an unforgiving portrait of a domestic tyrant crushing the hope from her child for the sake of free labour, and Ryan is fantastic in the role, shading the performance, so you can see the fear behind her eyes, as well as the selfishness and cruelty. These characters have depth, there is nuance and subtlety at play. That comes from the writing, the acting and the direction. It's thoughtful theatre. For all the shocks and the violence, this is not Grand Guignol. There is a shabbiness to these acts of domestic horror that makes them worse - humdrum, mundane misery that is far more human than flinging about the Kensington Gore. It's cleverly realised stuff. Emma Jordan is a fantastic director and this is in the top tier of her work. 

Best of all is Nicky Harley as Maureen, the fulcrum around which the story revolves. Her performance is extraordinary. She shows us so many Maureens: the down-trodden defeated drudge with the sharp tongue, the local oddball in the bad clothes, the newly awakened sensual paramour, the dull-eyed avenging angel, the confused and flustered fantasist, and she inhabits them all in dizzying succession. This seems like a breakaway role, a tremendous showcase for her talents. This production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane is beautifully acted and directed, handsomely staged, and with a story and performances that stay with you long after you shuffle out of the theatre, into the still hot, still light Belfast evening.