A real beauty at the Ramor
London Classic Theatre presents The Beauty Queen Of Leenane by Martin McDonagh.
Head for the Ramor Theatre Friday or Saturday of next week (February 19 or 20) and you'll be transported to a legendary claustrophobic kitchen of a rural cottage in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway in the early 1990s.
London Classic Theatre presents The Beauty Queen Of Leenane by Martin McDonagh, described by the Daily Telegraph as "wildly funny, deeply affecting and grotesquely macabre... an absolute cracker".
Director of this production is Michael Cabot, designer is Kerry Bradley, lighting designer Joe Vose and costume designer Katja Krzesinska.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a blend of comedy, and tragedy. It centres on the life of Maureen Folan, a 40-year-old spinster who takes care of her selfish, manipulative mother, 70-year-old Mag.
Maureen's two sisters have escaped into marriage and family life, but Maureen, with a history of mental illness, finds herself trapped in a seriously dysfunctional relationship with her mother. This is a world of tragic farce, the characters playing out their roles in ever-decreasing circles of hopelessness, where events are simultaneously comic, horrifying and absurd.
During the course of the play, the Folan cottage is visited by Pato Dooley and his nephew Ray. Pato is a middle-aged construction worker fed up with having to live and work in England, disappointed by the limitations and loneliness of his life. Nineteen-year-old Ray feels similarly stuck in his home town, and is desperate to escape to England. There is some sharply-observed comic relief in the two meetings between elderly Mag and the teenage 'bad boy', the two generations finding little common ground, trapped in state of mutual non-comprehension.
The glimmer of a last-chance romance between Maureen and Pato sparks the play into life, briefly offering the characters the possibility of a different existence.
The plot, full of deceptions, secrets and betrayals keeps endlessly surprising the audience. Hopes are raised only to be dashed. McDonagh's play is tragic yet still terribly and darkly funny.
Pato sums up the idiocy of this tight-knit and small-minded rural community: "Of course it's beautiful here, a fool can see.
The mountains and the green, and people speak. But everybody knows everybody else's business. You can't kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge twenty year."
• For further information or bookings, contact the theatre at 049-8547074.
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