Peter Viney's Blog

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

by Martin McDonagh

Directed by Rachel O’Riordan
Designed by Good Teeth Theatre
Composer and sound designer Anna Clock

Chichester Minerva Theatre
Saturday 25 September, 14.45

CAST

Adam Best- Pato
Ingrid Craigie – Mag
Orla Fitzgerald – Maureen
Kwaku Fortune – Ray

Martin McDonagh and Jez Butterworth are our joint favourite modern playwrights. The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the first part of the Leenane Trilogy. The second Aran Islands trilogy has not been completed.

The play is set in Connemara in the west of Ireland, and was first performed in 1996. The date of the action is indeterminate, but we suspect some time before that … by 1996 people were saying the West of Ireland’s economy meant Range Rovers and Mercedes abounded. I’ll do a quick plot summary, though see also my review of a surprisingly good amateur theatre production, The Beauty Queen of Leenane , in 2018 for more.

Plot summary

Mag is a demanding, needy, whining tyrant to her daughter, Maureen. Maureen is the youngest daughter and stuck with the old lady, as happens so often with a youngest child. Her sisters have escaped. There are hints of bullying and abuse by Maureen with the scald on Mag’s hand. Maureen is a virgin, and her past includes time in England, where her job had been ‘cleaning the bogs.’ She ended up in a mental hospital, which Mag will not let her forget.

Their neighbour’s youngest son Ray calls in. His older brother Pato is returning from England to see some “yank” cousins. There will be a party, and Maureen is invited. He gives the invitation to Mag (Maureen is out feeding the chickens) who destroys it. However, Maureen meets Ray and knows. She goes out and buys a “skimpy black frock” for the party.

After the party Pato comes back and stays the night with Maureen. Pato has long admired her, and calls her The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

He bumps into Mag in the morning, and cheerfully offers to make her porridge and Complan. Then Maureen comes in and flounces around in her slip boasting of the sex the night before. Act two opens with a letter from Pato in London, apologising that he had brewer’s droop on the night and inviting Maureen to come to Boston with him. The letter is entrusted to Ray on strict instructions to put it in Maureen’s hand, but Ray is persuaded to give it to Mag. She again reads it and destroys it and tragedy ensues. Enough.

Read on. They got a lot wrong in this production. In many ways the amateur one we saw was more effective at presenting the text.

The theatrical space

This was the first negative issue. The Minerva at Chichester is one of my very favourite theatres, and it’s three quarters in the round. Here a low platform thrust stage had been placed on the playing area, similar in shape, though narrower, than the Royal Shakespeare Theatre or Wanamaker Playhouse thrust stages. The play is a co-production with The Lyric, Hammersmith, where it is heading next.

Look at the two seating plans, Lyric left, Minerva right.

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I do not envy the director, Rachel O’Riordan, the task of blocking a production to fit both theatres. The thing is The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a claustrophobic play, best with the actors confined in a tight space. Its natural setting is a proscenium stage, or at least a stage at one end. The Lyric appears to have initiated this one, and frankly, it doesn’t work in the Minerva’s space. We usually choose seats at the end facing the stage, but this time chose A3 and A4 … it feels more Covid-safe to be in the front row. If you look at the photos further below, we were sitting right behind the TV facing in. From the sides, nothing looks as good as the photos.

We have sat at the sides at the Minerva, RSC and Wanamaker several times. The play was badly blocked. Worse would have been directly opposite where the large range (essential to the plot) continually emitted a mist (water I guess, to look like smoke). The play relies mainly on intense dialogue, which means anyone at either side sees one speaker, but the back of the other. Then Pato’s letter reading was right at the front of the thrust stage, so everyone at the sides was behind him. The only actor who had a chance of using the space well was Orla Fitzgerald as Maureen in her long monologue, which she took beautifully, pacing around the thrust stage and involving everyone in the audience. She got movement, but with Mag semi-confined to her chair, the movement which a nearly in-the-round production requires is not possible. Ray strode about a lot, but not to much purpose.

To add to the sight-line issues, the kitchen sink area is vitally important, and was in the extreme back stage left corner. We got stiff necks trying to look at it. Sorry, but the director simply had not come to terms with placing the play in this theatrical space. It will certainly work better at the Lyric.

Great play. Great actors. Great theatre.
Bad match.

That’s not the only issue.

Age

This is an intrinsic issue, though not insurmountable. Mag is seventy (and this is mentioned several times … and is a key punchline at the end). Maureen is forty.

McDonagh is London-Irish and his experience of Connemara was visiting grandparents.He was born in 1970. I can believe that when he was seven or eight, his grandparents would have seemed ancient at Mag’s age. I know my grandad was hobbling around on a stick, peering myopically through thick glasses and wheezing when he was several years younger than I am now. If we place Mag as seventy, then at the Chichester Matinee, she would be younger than the majority of the audience, many of whom were sprightly, brightly dressed, bounding up and down the stairs. How do you resolve it? Maureen has to be of child-bearing age, but getting on and a surprising virgin for her age. Mag in rural Ireland would have married young, but could have had children over a twenty year extent. Women are having first children in their forties increasingly. I’d have asked McDonagh’s permission to make it eighty and forty-five. The age “seventy” for a chair bound old lady living on Complan caused a few mutters, even laughter. Revive the show in ten years, and people of seventy will increasingly be working. In my father-in-law’s care home the chef was over seventy.

The theme, the desperation of a full-time carer like Maureen and what it can drive her to, is a stronger topic even in 2021 than it was in 1996. In that way, the play has grown.

Set and costume

The set needs to be full of “stuff” and while they tried, it was mainly against the back wall, and odd piles at the side didn’t create the effect. That Arena Theatre one in 2018, had also followed the text and had pictures of John and Robert Kennedy on the wall. Missing here (or out of my sight line).

Costume was poor. They had the right stuff, but even after a long run, it looks spanking new. Mag’s clothes need to look older. She needed a dirty, unwashed hair wig, but she didn’t get it. She has been neglected, not simply dressed in unfashionable old lady clothes. You need stains on the housecoat. I will point out that at some points in the run you do have to dry clean the costumes, and we may have seen the day after!

Sound and music

This really annoyed me, and the last production got this wrong too. A major feature of the play is the song The Spinning Wheel by Delia Murphy, first recorded in 1942. I fail to see how they could prepare a programme without crediting it. More to follow …

When Maureen comes into the house after the party with Pato, they turn on the radio. The song plays. Here it was very low in volume.

Mellow the moonlight to shine is beginning,
Close by the window young Eileen is spinning;
Then toward the fire, blind grandmother sitting,
Is crooning and mourning and drowsily knitting.

You wouldn’t have noticed it as anything significant at the background volume. They need to stop and listen to at least a couple of verses before they continue. They didn’t.

At the very end of the play, after the funeral, Maureen sits in her mother’s rocking chair. Earlier in the play, Mag was waiting for a radio dedication from Maureen’s sisters. The radio is on, a dedication from the sister’s for Mag’s 71st Birthday is read out (so way too late), and The Spinning Wheel plays. McDonagh’s script asks for at least four verses to play. This was loud. It should have been earlier. Poor sound design? Or poor sound operation on the day? Who knows.

The song is crucial. I’d go further, the programme has an essay on second houses in Connemara from The Irish Times in 1997. I saw no relevance. Far better would be an essay on Delia Murphy. She discovered many traditional songs for the first time. Her father used to encourage travellers to stay on his lands, and she learned songs from them and was the first to record them. Her husband was an Irish ambassador, and was serving in Rome in 1941, and Delia is credited with helping to save 6500 Jews and allied soldiers. She is a heroine in Irish history and a major folk archivist.

The composed music for the play was jarring and lacked an Irish feel over scene shifts. Not appropriate.

The cast …

They were all excellent. As with the stage movement issue, Mag’s malevolence could have been pointed by a more significant stage position. We both thought that given the later references to brewer’s droop, Pato could have looked more tipsy in the scene.

Orla Fitzgerald was outstanding as Maureen, angry then feisty, then sexy, then defeated, then vulnerable, then exposed as a fantasist, then truly vicious. There is a minor problem is that she is too good-looking to appear dragged down and on the shelf at forty. Ingrid Craigie was a subtle Mag and did the final scene particularly effectively, but I’d prefer the malevolence played a little larger.

Overall

I apologize for negativity, but we discussed it at great length on the way home. We had to stop booking Chichester for evening performances because every time we got caught in long complex roadworks diversions from the A27 and M27 on the 66 mile drive home. I prefer evenings to matinees, but the journey ceased being worth it. Now they’ve moved diversions to all day Saturday, which added a tedious 40 minutes to the journey home (all spent talking about the play).

Given the quality of the actors and the intrinsic importance of the play, I’ll say three stars. I still think the Arena Theatre production was “just as good.”

You can see this production at the Lyric next month, and I am sure it will be greatly improved by a different theatre space.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

Another theatre blog is ‘The View From The Cheap Seats’ and there is always that aspect in the Press Night reviews … they are in the best seats, where the photographs above were taken and the rest of us were not. That means the blocking for a semi in-the-round theatre would not have affected them. The song should though!

four stars
The Telegraph ****
The Stage ****
Broadway World ****
Daily Mail ****

three stars
Arif Akbar, The Guardian ***
The Times, ***
Gareth Carr, What’s On Stage ***

MARTIN McDONAGH ON THIS BLOG
The Lieutenant of Inishmore, RSC 2001
The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Grandage Company 2018
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh, Grandage Season, West End 2013
Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, Royal Court, London 2015
The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh, Arena Theatre, 2018
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (FILM)
A Very, Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre 2018

ADAM BEST
Twelfth Night, National Theatre, 2017 (Antonio)
Flare Path by Terence Rattigan, Salisbury Playhouse 2015 (Jonny)

INGRID CRAIGIE
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh, Grandage Season, West End 2013 (Auntie Kate)