The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Rebel Wilson was to play the lead in this STC revival of Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy – the play was Wilson’s choice – before she pulled out mid-year and went to greener pastures.

Yael Stone instead plays Maureen, 40 years old, stranded in a remote bog Irish hovel as the reluctant carer of her irascible mother, Mag (Noni Hazlehurst).  

Maureen has a last chance to escape her mother – and Ireland – when Pato Dooley returns home from labouring in London, enlivened with that old Irish dream of making good in America.  But Mag destroys the budding, fumbling romance, and the story, born of loneliness and bitter disappointment, turns deadly.

Renee Mulder’s split cottage on revolve, with smoking stack and cramped with derelict detail, sits atop a forlorn and boggy coastal landscape.  Opportunities for escape seem painfully rare, and through the village everybody is looking for them.  Pato (endearingly played by Hamish Michael) wants out; so too does his young brother Ray, a delicious live wire of anxiety from Shiv Palekar.

McDonagh’s tight and engaging four-hander skims close to stereotype but it shines with the absurd ramblings and repetitions of everyday speech, its undertow of poverty and despair relieved by sparkles of irony and laughter.  

Paige Rattray’s excellent cast take the easy latter way, going for laughs, and stepping quickly past the shadows – as do so many Australian productions of anything darkly themed.

Yael Stone is impishly delightful as Maureen but only wears the full burden of her disappointments in her final devastation.  Noni Hazlehurst is such a perfect nightmare of manipulation and self-pity, it’s impossible to feel an ounce of empathy beyond the laughs.    Similarly, Rebel Wilson may well have brought the house down, with jokes all around.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman