Winner of the Evening Standard, Critics' Circle and Writers' Guild awards for Best New Play in 1996, this is the first major London revival of this "horrifically funny" play..
High in the mountains of Connemara live a lonely spinster Maureen and her devilishly manipulative mother Mag. Maureen longs for the romance that will spirit her away. But if she goes, who will stir the lumps out of Mag's Complan?
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
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4.1 (12) |  |
0.0 (0) |
| Venue | Young Vic (click for full venue information) |
General
| Genres | 20th Century • Comedy • Drama |
| Begins previews | 15 July 2010 |
| Opening | 21 July 2010 |
| Closing / Booking until | 21 August 2010 |
| Show times | Mon-Sat 7:30pm; Sat 2:30pm; Wed 04/08 & 18/08 2:30pm |
| Production website | http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/the-beauty-queen-of-leenane |
| Prices from | £15.00 |
| To | £22.50 |
| Running time | TBC |
| Ticket tips | Discounts for students, under 25s, over 60s, disabled people, unwaged people. http://www.youngvic.org/discounts |
Cast & Creatives
- Author/Writer Martin McDonagh
- Director Joe Hill-Gibbins
- Lighting design Charles Balfour
Editor reviews
View all editor reviewsAverage editor rating from: 12 user(s)
West End transfer now please!
| Rating: | 5.0 |
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Reviewed by zuberinoAugust 21, 2010
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| Review | That rare bird - a faultless production. If there's any justice, this should transfer immediately to the West End where it will reign triumphantly for months. |
A snide laugh at the backward Irish
| Rating: | 2.0 |
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Some see McDonagh in the tradition of J. M. Synge and Samuel Beckett. And the violent cruelty of his plays can be excused as rooted in folklore. But the hisses and boos that rippled through the audience confirm that it’s most indebted to old-fashioned melodrama. Much of the humour is generated by the nasty habits practised by the bog Irish which, in this instance, include the bitter old mother tipping her potty into a filthy kitchen sink. But sniggers also come from McDonagh’s gift for linguistic parody with goofy lines such as: ‘Maybe it is deaf you’re going.’ This is counted as poetry by some, but mockery by me. |
| Written by | Patrick Marmion |
| Full review | http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/reviews/article-1300720/The-Beauty-Queen-Leenane-Sniggering-Irish-just-takes-Mick.html |
Perhaps the best ever staging of this dark comedic gem
| Rating: | 5.0 |
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Reviewed by pearceglenJuly 31, 2010
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Life is bleak in the desolate farm house in rural Ireland, its cold, its damp and for Maureen and her mother Mag, any glimpse of happiness is one to be grabbed. The only problem is both are too busy fighting the other to notice. Maureen is a 40year old virgin, stuck in the decrepit house with her overbearing elderly mother Mag. Maureen dreams of a new life but Mag isn’t about to let her live in skivvy escape that easily. Mag is not the sweet granny she may appear and Maureen has her own demons barely contained. You can almost smell the damp in designer Ultz’s ramshackle house, this being one of those houses you wipe your feet when leaving. |
| Written by | Glen Pearce |
| Full review | http://gpearce.blogspot.com/2010/07/beauty-queen-of-leenane-young-vic.html |
Cracking revival of the blackest of black comedies
| Rating: | 4.0 |
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| Review | Pitch perfect revival with a terrific set and great performances - you may have met someone like Rosaleen Linehan's mother before! |
| Written by | Gareth James |
| Full review | http://garethjames.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/the-beauty-queen-of-leenane |
A richly enjoyable production
| Rating: | 4.0 |
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| Review | Rosaleen Linehan is magnificent as the meddling matriarch. An intercepted letter is a plot device that might well have seemed hoary in 1896 let alone a century later. But the scene in which Ms Linehan, greedily eyeing Pato's crucial missive to Maureen, persuades Ray to leave it undelivered, is a comic highlight because of the way she reduces him to head-banging torpor and frustration by her tactical demands for attention and long-winded lugubriousness. Eliciting gasps and delighted groans from the punters, this episode treads an expert line between melodrama and farce; not least of McDonagh's dubious assets is the ability to play an audience like a fiddle. |
| Written by | Paul Taylor |
| Full review | http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-beauty-queen-of-leenane-young-vic-london-2033155.html |
Delicious
| Rating: | 4.0 |
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Director Joe Hill-Gibbins gets maximum mileage out of the sense of claustrophobia of the single cottage-kitchen location, with designer Ultz providing a set that, characteristically, is clever but goes a bit too far. We enter the reconfigured auditorium through veils of rain spattering against sheets of polythene, which flank the ceilinged playing area itself; there is even a grassy area that can hardly be seen as folk enter and exit by the cottage’s main door, but which we get to pass on our own entrances. The central performances come from a pair of masterly Irish actresses. As Mag, Rosaleen Linehan has a set of features and an expressive skill that allow her to look innocent, pathetic, vindictive and furtive all at once. Susan Lynch has moved on from her sinister-siren early days: she can still evoke the dark heart that underlies so many of her roles, yet can now combine it with a genuine pathos and a sense that Maureen could well merit the title “the beauty queen of Leenane”, as she is dubbed by neighbour Pato, whose affection seems to offer her an escape. |
| Written by | Ian Shuttleworth |
| Full review | http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fb3e4c70-95a6-11df-b5ad-00144feab49a.html |
An edge of ruthlessness
| Rating: | 4.0 |
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Joe Hill Gibbins’s outstanding revival, with a superbly bleak and atmospheric cottage design by Ultz, features a poster bearing the words: “May you be half an hour in heaven afore the devil knows you’re dead”, but the two main characters already inhabit a hell of their own creation. Mag Folan, the 70 year old mother, who proudly talks about her urine infection as if it conferred a special distinction upon her, sits in her rocking chair, constantly bullying and bossing her daughter Maureen, a frustrated virgin of 40 who takes ingeniously spiteful acts of revenge. Their dialogue is full of inventive invective and lingering grudges, and the play becomes more charged than ever when a gauche and kindly local man begins to take an interest in Maureen, holding out the tantalising possibility that she might be able to escape to happiness. The dramatic tension McDonagh creates is brilliantly sustained, while the sudden twists and turns of the plot elicit genuine gasps of surprise from the audience. |
| Written by | Charles Spencer |
| Full review | http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/7904562/The-Beauty-Queen-of-Leenane-Young-Vic-review.html |
A powerful critique of contemporary Ireland
| Rating: | 4.0 |
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| Review | All this is beautifully realised in Joe Hill-Gibbins's production which plays expertly on the emotions. Rosaleen Linehan is magnificent as Mag, indecently gloating over her urine infection as if a badge of honour, and casting endless, furtive glances at a crucial letter intended for her daughter. And even if Susan Lynch is too attractive to be entirely plausible as a wallflower, she captures superbly the hints of Maureen's mental fragility. David Ganly as her putative rescuer, and Terence Keeley as his restless younger brother, also give pitch-perfect performances in a play that actively engages the audience while at the same time puncturing many of Ireland's most hallowed myths. |
| Written by | Michael Billington |
| Full review | http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/jul/22/the-beauty-queen-of-leenane-michael-billington |
You’ll never listen to Delia Murphy again without shuddering
| Rating: | 4.0 |
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| Review | Martin McDonagh’s play — hailed as a new classic both sides of the Atlantic since its birth in 1996 — is not the callous thing that we often hail as ‘black comedy”, but a richly human illustration of that tragicomic paradox. If it wasn’t so funny it would be squalid; if it didn’t end so horribly it would be a wry sitcom. McDonagh is not guying this desperate Ireland, but mourning its fate with real feeling. The four players, and Joe Hill-Gibbins as director, take on a challenge in accommodating both the jokes and the tragedy. Measure their triumph in breaths around you on the steep raked benches: plentiful aahs of sympathy or gasps of dismay. |
| Written by | Libby Purves |
| Full review | http://www.upthewestend.com/shows/west-end-major-shows/the-beauty-queen-of-leenane-young-vic.html |
The best deal in town
| Rating: | 5.0 |
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Dialogue this scabrously funny virtually speaks itself but the central duo offer up sparkling turns. Lynch, with a default setting of bedraggled and dishevelled, gives Maureen a wrenching ache of loneliness, as well as a fierce spark of independent spirit. The magnificent Linehan, the very opposite of a sweet old lady, makes Mag a malignant Buddha sprouting in her strategically-placed rocking chair. So vividly does director Joe Hill-Gibbins realise this scenario that the enrapt first-night audience emitted a panto-like chorus of spontaneous cheers and groans, as they willed Maureen on to the sort of happy ending that doesn’t tend to win the hatfuls of awards Beauty Queen has. |
| Written by | Fiona Mountford |
| Full review | http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/review-23858883-the-beauty-queen-of-leenane-is-the-best-deal-in-town.do |
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