Roslyn Packer theatre, Sydney
Martin McDonagh’s play reveals a deep, unspeakable vulnerability under Paige Rattray’s direction
When theatre is really good – when it seeps into your gut and twists it – it’s like the world shrinks to a pinpoint. There is nothing but the play. And on the opening night of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane at STC’s Roslyn Packer theatre, the audience seemed to lean forward and hold a shared breath over the simple tension of someone placing a letter unattended on a chair. The smallest gestures writ large and life-changing.
In the audience, so too on stage: the universe is a grimy cottage shared by mother and daughter. Maureen (Yael Stone) and Mag (Noni Hazlehurst) are trapped in a living purgatory in that home, which smells like urine and looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in years. When Maureen’s done with a tea bag, she throws it over her shoulder without bothering to see where it lands. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. She’s trapped here, 40 years old and caring for relentlessly mean, helpless Mag (and Maureen is just as mean, shockingly so, to her old mother). All Mag can do is keep her daughter down to keep her at home, and Hazlehurst launches these attacks with shrewd folksiness. Outside, Ireland is economically depressed, and there’s no work in Leenane; everyone is leaving for London or Boston if they can. But there’s no way out for Maureen, not that she can see; all she can do is make her mother’s nutritional supplement and leave it lumpy, or buy her mother’s least favourite biscuits for her snack, to feel she has some control of her life.
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