The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh, Young Vic Theatre

When Martin McDonagh’s Leenane plays first appeared in Ireland, they seemed exciting for many reasons: their delinquent humour, their rootedness in (but distance from) the Irish dramatic tradition, their wilfully transgressive attitude – and, in particular, their disorientating blend of the past with the present. The environment that McDonagh presented seemed like a skewed representation of 1950s Ireland: eternally rain-filled and poteen-soaked, his Leenane was populated by an over-familiar rabble of frustrated spinsters, lonely priests, ape-like peasants, and kind-hearted but feisty colleens. Yet the language that those characters used was firmly rooted in the 1990s, with references to Packie Bonner’s performance in the 1994 World Cup, the wars in Bosnia, Bishop Eamon Casey, and so on. Many academic critics have suggested that McDonagh’s plays allowed audiences (especially in Dublin) to laugh at an imagined version of our rural past – to reassure themselves that we had left that old Ireland behind. But, watching those plays travel around Ireland between 1996 and 2001, I always felt that McDonagh was doing something far more challenging. His inclusion of those topical references tended to disrupt our sense of distance from the past: he seemed to be suggesting that we can’t ever forget where we came from, much as we might like to pretend otherwise. non-peer-reviewed