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| From left, Maureen (Janie Lawson) and Mag (Alice Ferguson). Photo: Janelle McMenamin |
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a funny, dark and deeply human play.
Maureen (Janie Lawson) is in her forties, unmarried and caring for her aged mother Mag (Alice Ferguson). The beauties of the Irish countryside do not compensate, although they are visible out the kitchen window. When Pato (Bruce Hardie) comes gently courting it’s the old call of escape via migration to America rather than to England or the siren song of Australian soaps coming from the TV set. But events will turn more on the unthinking actions of his nephew Ray (Robbie Haltiner) and the terrible tensions between mother and daughter.
Director and designer Cate Clelland’s set only contains two dankly green walls of a house but they hold the window out onto the countryside and the front door which might mean escape or imprisonment.
There are impressive performances all round. Lawson is a brooding Maureen, longing for what Pato can offer her but ugly in word and deed when she is thwarted. Ferguson’s Mag is a study in the machinations of the declining ageing invalid whose life is running along different tracks to her daughter’s. Her unthinking actions have dark repercussions. The relationship between mother and daughter is ultimately a brutal one.
Haltiner as Ray is too focussed on his own shallow world of old feuds and an inability to carry instructions in his memory to see potential consequences. The character brings humour to the script but increasingly he’s an awful unknowing harbinger of doom.
Hardie’s Pato brings in a breath of hope with a sensitive reading aloud of his letter to Maureen which offers her a real future.
There’s much ‘If only…’ in the feelings awoken by this piece. Only the unthinking Ray seems to escape.
A freezing cold night at the ACT Hub but a focussed production and an absorbed audience kept the theatre warm.