The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh

First published: 1996

First produced: 1996, at the Druid Theater in Galway, Ireland

Type of plot: Realism; comedy

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: Leenane, a town in western Ireland

Principal Characters:

• Maureen Folan, a plain, single, middle-aged woman
• Mag Folan, her ailing elderly mother
• Pato Dooley, her handsome neighbor
• Ray Dooley, Pato’s twenty-year-old brother

The Play

In The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Mag Folan wages a relentless and petty war with her forty-year-old daughter, Maureen, a spinster, who lives in lonely isolation with her semi-invalid mother in a small cottage in the remote Irish community of Leenane. The two women have developed a mutually dependent relationship in which each vies for superiority over the other, both bound to an emotionally empty, dead-end life. Mag constantly accuses Maureen of neglecting her, and the daughter accuses her mother of faking illness in an effort to keep her home. Pato Dooley, a handsome Irishman who lives in London and is employed as a construction worker there, is visiting his family in Leenane. Pato’s brother Ray comes by to invite the Folans to his uncle’s going-away party. Mag is too ill, but Maureen goes and meets Pato. She invites him home, and he stays the night. The next morning, Maureen flaunts their night of lovemaking before her mother, who responds by telling Pato of Maureen’s period of madness years earlier. Mag’s attempt to discourage Maureen’s new lover fails, however: When Pato leaves, his and Maureen’s mutual attraction remains strong. The audience senses that he offers Maureen the hope of escape from her miserable life with Mag.

Back in London, Pato plans to emigrate to the United States and writes Maureen, asking her to accompany him there. Fearing that Mag may intercept the letter, he entrusts its delivery to his brother, Ray, with strict instructions to give it only to Maureen. When Ray shows up at Maureen’s cottage, he finds only Mag. Suspecting that the letter contains important news for her daughter, Mag attempts to cajole Ray into letting her deliver it to Maureen. Initially he refuses, but, impatient to leave and still resenting Maureen for her haughty behavior toward him and for taking his game ball years earlier, he leaves the letter with Mag, who promptly reads and burns it. Later, Maureen learns that Pato has returned home on his way to America. When he does not visit, she concludes that their night together was only a passing affair for him and that he does not love her after all. When Mag lets slip that Pato actually sent Maureen a letter, Maureen forces a confession from her mother by pouring boiling grease over Mag’s hand. Learning that Pato asked Maureen to go to the United States with him and realizing that she missed her chance, Maureen throws the remaining hot grease over her mother’s stomach and face and rushes out.

When Maureen reappears, she has slipped back into madness and, in a vivid hallucination, imagines that she and Pato meet at the train station, passionately embrace and kiss, confess their mutual love, and plan for her to follow him to the United States once her mother’s care is arranged. In reality, Maureen kills Mag with a poker and looks on with indifference when the old woman’s body falls out of her rocker and onto the floor. After the funeral, Ray tells Maureen that Pato, now in the United States, has become engaged to another woman. Maureen’s confusion leads Ray to conclude that she is a “loon.” On his way out, he agrees to deliver Maureen’s farewell message to Pato, and Ray is to say that it is from “the beauty queen of Leenane.” As Ray leaves, the radio announcer is heard dedicating a tune to Mag Folan in honor of her seventy-first birthday.

Dramatic Devices

McDonagh’s setting reflects the drab, claustrophobic world of Maureen and her mother. It combines aspects of the typical peasant cottage with modern elements, such as a television set, portraits of Robert and John F. Kennedy, a radio, and a hot plate for heating Mag’s beverages. Despite these modern touches, the cottage is as bare as the lives of Maureen and Mag. The television set, constantly playing Australian soap operas, underscores the unceasing soap-opera quality of their life together; they are boxed in by a monotonous routine, limited in their options, and distant from any creative fulfillment and vigorous health.

In contrast to the sunny life outside their door, the lurid glow of the television set symbolizes the pallor of the women’s emotional lives. Mag’s diet of biscuits and Complan, a nutritional supplement, suggests that the old woman suffers from an unspecified disorder. For Mag, the diet becomes a weapon with which she both punishes and controls Maureen; at the same time, it reflects her physical and spiritual invalidism. The beverage is as bland and monotonous as her life, and her endless carping and whining combine with the droning television set to punish Maureen with a demoralizing harassment.

The bickering between Mag and Maureen sometimes evokes laughter for its relentless pettiness, but the amusement turns to horror as the underlying hatred, viciousness, and spite become evident; taking care of mother takes on murderous implications.

In addition to depicting how the amusing badinage between mother and daughter turns to vicious acts of violence, McDonagh makes very effective dramatic use of his stage props. The rocking chair, a symbol of the monotonous rhythm of life in this bare room, dumps Mag onto the stage floor like a bag of used laundry at the end. The droning television set provides an apt soundtrack of the characters’ monotonous lives and reveals Ray’s addiction to television when he visits, barely able to take his eyes off it or conduct a conversation about anything else. The fire poker plays multiple roles, too; Ray is so taken with its appearance that he offers to buy it, and both irony and suspense build as Mag, its later victim, refuses to sell it to him, prompting him to mutter that it goes to waste in that home. The most pointed irony is delivered by the announcer on the radio, who dedicates a song to Mag as the lights fade at the play’s end, and the last voice the audience hears wishes the murdered woman a happy birthday and many more ahead.

Critical Context

The Beauty Queen of Leenane was the first of McDonagh’s plays to be produced, and it won immediate acclaim for its author. It forms part of a trilogy that includes A Skull in Connemara (pr., pb. 1997) and The Lonesome West (pr., pb. 1997), which were produced at the Druid Theater one year after The Beauty Queen of Leenane. All three plays develop the same set of characters and reflect life in the loneliness of western Ireland, a loneliness that borders on despair. McDonagh, in the plays that followed The Beauty Queen of Leenane, continued to focus on lost, violent characters trapped in empty lives without hope of fulfillment. The vigor, and often humor, with which he develops these characters shows understanding and sympathy, a keen ear for speech patterns, and an exceptional sense of pacing, which creates suspense and highly dramatic and effective conclusions.

Critics have placed The Beauty Queen of Leenane among those plays that view Ireland as a modern wasteland, which, like Maureen, has been deprived of romance or any vitalizing experience, with the possible exception of violence. Audiences have found pessimism, moral disengagement, and aimlessness running through all of McDonagh’s plays. Maureen and Mag are not burdened by conscience as they seek to destroy any chance of happiness for each other; their nihilism reflects an amoral, uninvolved culture that has lost touch with the land or with religious conviction and that has not gained any meaningful and stabilizing beliefs or occupations in their place. These characters are not emotionally bound to the soil as in traditional Irish drama; McDonagh’s people have been uprooted from tradition and alienated from one another.

Although McDonagh’s plays are set in western Ireland, the playwright spent only summers there as a youth and has lived mostly in London. Though he has had considerable success as a playwright, he is more interested in watching and making movies than he is in writing and producing plays. His influences have come from the cinema, and from directors Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino principally. His plays have been compared to those of John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey, both major twentieth century Irish playwrights who wrote dramas that focused on peasant life.

Along with other contemporary playwrights, McDonagh has been hailed as a fresh voice in modern Irish theater; his brand of drama has been called the “new brutalism” for the way it brings violence to the stage and derives dark humor from it, using language that combines pungent street talk and lyric grace. The Beauty Queen of Leenane demonstrates McDonagh’s nervy treatment of violence by having a piece of Mag’s skull fall onstage as she collapses out of her rocking chair. Such elements have raised critical eyebrows yet brought loud acclaim for McDonagh’s “cruel comedy” and realistic treatment of people who live tawdry, boring, emotionally vapid lives with no hope that their drab existence will ever change.

Sources for Further Study

Brustein, Robert. “The Rebirth of Irish Drama.” The New Republic 216 (April 7, 1997): 28-30.

Feeney, Joseph J. “Where Pain and Laughter Meet: The Irish Plays of Martin McDonagh.” America 177, no. 16 (November 22, 1997): 20.

Fricker, Karen. “Ireland Feels Power of ’Beauty.’” Variety 380, no. 1 (August 21-27, 2000): 27, 31.

Kroll, Jack. “The McDonagh Effect: A New Playwright Blends Irish and American, Theater and Movies, Plus a Dash of Punk.” Newsweek 131, no. 11 (March 16, 1998): 73.

Lahr, John. “The Theatre: The Playwright Martin McDonagh.” The New Yorker, January 27, 1997, 84.

Trotter, Mary. “The Beauty Queen of Leenane and A Night in November.” Theatre Journal 51, no. 3 (1999): 336-339.

Wolf, Matt. “Martin McDonagh on a Tear.” American Theatre 15, no. 1 (January, 1998): 48-50.