The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Theatre Royal, Waterford

Whichever camp you belong to regarding writer Martin McDonagh, there’s no denying his skill as a playwright and the brilliance of his play

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

, the first in the Leenane trilogy and the piece that catapulted him into renown. It is performed often ­– most recently this summer at the Young Vic with Susan Lynch and Rosaleen Linahan – and no wonder: the play is so good it would be hard to get wrong, and could keep nearly a corpse at the edge of its seat.

Director Ben Barnes’s production provides a faithful version of the rural squalour of the lives of Mag and Maureen Folan. The claustrophobic set, complete with two grimy cookers, underscores this. Gillian Hanna impishly renders a beady-eyed Mag, the mother incapacitated (when it suits her) by illness and bitterness. Her malevolence only betrays a chink in its armour when she’s caught in lies by her long-suffering but no less malevolent daughter Maureen (Jenni Ledwell). Hanna works her role with the range of a spoilt, wilful child, but Ledwell’s take on the daughter misses the mark.

Maureen should have a tightly-coiled, too easily explodable knot of pathological fury in her, brought on by a crippling lack of self worth. Yet in Ledwell’s interpretation, the character’s sense of self and reserve is so complete she might just as easily be frustrated at not winning the lotto yet again. The most suspenseful scene involves Ray (carefully pitched and endearingly played by Conor MacNeill), Mag and the letter that can never promise a better life – because the real marriage, with its destructive mutual need and loathing, is between Maureen and Mag, till death do them part.

Michael Power as Pato is every Irish mother-in-law's dream (except Mag, of course). In this rural Irish response to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, only those like Pato, who can break free from the claws of these constricting, dysfunctional relationships, survive.

Runs until Saturday and then touring