The Leenane Trilogy

The Leenane Trilogy
The Beauty Queen of Leenane; A Skull In Connemarra; The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh. The Kin Collective. At fortyfive downstairs, Melbourne. The trilogy 1, 9 & 15 June. SOLD OUT. Beauty Queen 28-31 May; Skull 3-7 June; Lonesome 10-14 June.

Having opted to see the entire Leenane Trilogy in one fell swoop, I came away with a number of impressions.  First, three 100 minute plays in seven hours, spoken by some cast in impenetrable ‘Oirish’ accents, may not be the best idea.  Second, it’s a challenge to build and dress three sets on the one day (suggestive designs by Casey-Scott Corless).  Third, there appear to be two Martin McDonaghs.  One displays great if melancholy insight into human behavior and emotion, can makes us laugh even as we wince, and has his audience gripped by that unfailing question, ‘What will happen next?’  The other McDonagh is a bit of a windy, self-indulgent smarty-pants.  If you know Mr McDonagh’s movies, you can see the first in In Bruges and the second in Seven Psychopaths

I should say, however that The Beauty Queen of Leenane won a Critics’ Circle Theatre Award (1996), a Drama Desk Award (1998) and was nominated for a Lawrence Olivier Award for ‘Best New Play’, and a Tony.  A Skull In Connemarra was nominated for an Olivier also for ‘Best New Comedy’ and The Lonesome West was nominated for a Tony in 1999.

All three plays are set in Leenane, a village in County Galway, but they are three quite separate plays, with no character appearing in more than one play, although there are references to characters in the other plays.

Mr McDonagh’s Leenane is a place mired in misery, mud and ignorance, where violence is commonplace, where cultural references are to American, UK and Australian (!) television shows, and, far from being in the grip of the Catholic Church, it is a place where religion may be ingrained, but its representatives are mocked.  It’s the Ireland of John Millington Synge, only worse, rather than that of John Ford’s fairytale The Quiet Man.

The Beauty Queen easily succeeds best of these three plays.  Perhaps it had the advantage of having been performed four times before I saw it at the-trilogy-in-one-day thing, but it seems to me that the text is also straightforward and clear: it has a dynamic in the present (it’s happening right before our eyes with a minimum of exposition) and it tells its story with steadily mounting tension – until, in the end, it breaks our hearts.  

Director Declan Eames guides the story and the performances with precision and a fluidity that integrates the gasp-making reveals into the flow.  Maureen Folan (Michala Banas, in a lovely performance ranging from touching to funny to frightening) is a simmering cauldron of rage, disappointment and sexual frustration.  She’s trapped by her malicious monster of a mother, Mag Folan (Noni Hazelehurst in an unwaveringly and deliciously nasty turn).  Hope for love, sex, escape and a future appears in the figure of Pato Dooley (relaxed and amiable Ling Hasler).  Dylan Watson, as Ray Dooley, energetically points up the depths of stupidity with which poor Maureen is surrounded, but is as much a device as a character and rather outstays his welcome.  That’s not Mr Watson’s fault; it’s Mr McDonagh’s.

After the achievement of Beauty Queen, A Skull in Connemarra is a disappointment.  I believe it’s safe to say that over half the audience was somewhere between confused and bored.  This is a play in which very little actually happens in the present.  Mick Dowd (Christopher Bunworth in a doughty performance tinged with acid) is hired to move bones from the overcrowded churchyard.  One of the skeletons he digs up is that of his wife, whom Mick may or may not have murdered.  (Somebody or other is killed or has been killed in all three plays.)  The local cop (Pete Reid) longs to pin the crime on Mick, but is thwarted, mainly, it seems, because he is not the smartest detective.  In this place, could he be anything else? 

Instead of any more action than that, the characters recount, argue over and lie about the past.  Thus it is a play consisting almost entirely of exposition, which need not be fatal, except that Tim Barton and Pete Reid’s attempts at Irish accents render their share of it largely incomprehensible.  David Cameron’s direction opts for a rather breathless pace with characters talking over each other, which doesn’t help one’s grasp of meaning and significance either.  Marg Downey, as Mary Johnny Rafferty, neighbour, bingo cheat, poteen tippler and exposition vehicle, plays it straight and well.

John Banas directs The Lonesome West with a sure grasp of the characters’ light and shade, but it’s interesting that the most engaging scene (that is, one where you care) is between Dean Cartwell, as Father Welsh, the failed priest (or the priest who thinks he’s failed) and Laura Maitland, as Girleen Kelleher, local bad girl teen, on a jetty beside a lake.  Even that scene, it must be said, is twice as long as it need be. 

It’s a play that hinges on the endless (it seems endless) bickering, rivalry and incipient violence of two childish brothers – albeit extremely well realized by Mark Diaco (Valene) and James O’Connell (Coleman).  Coleman, having killed their father and got away with it, persists in provocation of his, anal religious figurine-loving brother.  He’s relentless (and so is the writing, unfortunately) in the kind of infuriatingly infantile behaviour that has you longing for him to suffer serious bodily harm.  Mr O’Connell does this very well indeed. 

The more overtly serious thread is Father Welsh’s conviction that ‘God has no jurisdiction in Leenane’ and his accurate sense that he is regarded as a joke.  (A running gag in all three plays is that people keep calling the hapless cleric ‘Walsh’ instead of ‘Welsh’.  Funny?)  But once Father Welsh is out of the story, we’re left with some fleeting regret from the brothers and a reversion to their too-late-to-change animosity, which is actually their symbiotic way of relating and structuring time; they’d be lost without it.  The last is valid enough a point about such limited characters, but the scene in which it is made goes on and on and on – as if Mr McDonagh felt that if he wrote long enough he might find an ending.  All the weight is on these two idjits and the sympathy Mr McDonagh elicits in Beauty Queen is absent.

I wonder how all this goes down in Ireland.  Is it satire?  Is it only a slightly heightened version of rural, western Ireland?  Is it an analysis of what ails the joint?  It may well be.  The characterization is merciless and often the humour only just saves it from contempt.  If you wrote like this here about the people of some remote, backblocks hamlet, you’d be pilloried if not crucified.  Even if you were hilarious.

Michael Brindley 

Images (from top): Michala Banas and Noni Hazlehurst in The Beauty Queen of Leenane; Marg Downey and Chris Bunworth in ASkull in Connemara; Pete Reid in A Skull in Connemara; Dean Cartmel, Mark Diaco and James O'Connell in The Lonesome West; Dean Cartmel in The Lonesome West. Photographer: Lachlan Woods.

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