The beauty of it all

If you were to ask someone about Martin McDonagh’s first feature film, the black comedy In Bruges, it’s likely that they would know what you were talking about. If, however, you were to mention McDonagh’s 1996 stage debut, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the chances are that you would be met with wrinkled brows and blank stares. But now it’s McDonagh’s first theatrical work that’s got people talking, as director Tony Cownie prepares a new staging—a feat, Cownie admits, that’s taken a long time to come to fruition. “I started thinking about it two summers ago. I mean, you’ve got to do so much forward-planning.”

It seems that Cownie wasn’t alone in his wish: “Mark [Thomson, the Lyceum’s Artistic Director] actually wanted to do a Martin McDonagh in his first season here. We’ve just been waiting for the right thing to come along, and I feel it’s a really good time to do McDonagh. He’s a brilliant writer, and it’s always nice to give the audience something different.”

Now that the opportunity has arisen to stage McDonagh’s work, it seems evident what attracted Cownie to this particular piece:

“I think it’s because he’s such a brilliant writer, he mixes tragedy with comedy so brilliantly, and the language is wonderful. It seems simple but it’s actually really complex.”

McDonagh’s play, which according to legend was written in just eight days, follows a dysfunctional family in rural Ireland. Cownie continues: “It’s about Maureen, a 40-year old woman, who lives with her mother, Mag... it’s about their relationship and how trapped she is in this remote part of Ireland, looking after an old mother who won’t do anything for herself. It’s just about how fraught the tensions are between the two generations: her mother stifles her, and Maureen doesn’t have any kind of social life.”

This theme of loneliness and isolation, which runs through the play, has also affected the set design. “The set’s small; there’s not a lot of room to move around, so it has that claustrophobia,” Cownie says. “The room; it sort of feels like a little island in the middle of the stage and we’re going to have rain. Rain’s quite a theme in the play, it rains all the time, so it’s just to sort of have that presence really, so that she’s actually trapped on an island.”

The Beauty Queen of Leenane is peppered with themes from family dysfunction to repression, isolation and claustrophobia, but also has much more to offer. Cownie declares that the audience are “in for a real treat and it’s always very exciting to discover people. If you’ve never actually come across Martin McDonagh’s writing then you’re in for a real treat; he’s a very exciting voice.”

But with so many different powerful motifs appearing throughout the play, were there any changes that had to be made? “No. Martin McDonagh’s got a bit of a reputation for thumping people actually: he’s done it a couple of times, so I’m not going to take any risks there!”