This is the blog post about the last of the competing plays in this year's Theatre Ontario Festival, which showcases the best plays of the four regional festivals held earlier. One more post will follow, as a postscript, with some more general comments and memories about the Festival and a list of award winners.
THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE
by Martin McDonagh
Presented by Peterborough Theatre Guild
(EODL Entry)
"Loose lips sink ships."
Every play presented this week has been a cautionary tale on several levels. In each of the last 3 plays, a character has been undone by flapping their big mouth in the wrong way at the wrong moment -- an odd coincidence.
That's by no means the only or even the deepest or biggest message one takes away from experiencing The Beauty Queen of Leenane but it's an important one all the same.
Carl Jung wrote extensively about the "Shadow", the dark portion hidden inside the human psyche which so influences our behaviour but which we fear to acknowledge and try to ignore. This play becomes, in effect, the shadow to the work of three other playwrights, two well-known and one not. And in the process, it bring us uncomfortably face to face with our own inward shadow.
My old theatre friends from Elliot Lake may recall the play Subject to Change by Jules Tasca. It's an uproariously silly comedy about an ageing woman who imposes endlessly on her sister because she fears trying to live and function on her own. In the end, the sister marries and leaves anyway and the woman sets her teeth and starts working at independent living. Well, Beauty Queen focuses on a mother-daughter relationship, and ends much more unpleasantly and unhappily, but the theme of the old imposing on relatives is central here too.
The other two, of course, are the famous great Irish classic playwrights, John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey. These men developed and perfected a lilting, playful style of English speech as spoken by Irish people that has a distinct and captivating music built right into it. Martin McDonagh has taken this convention as a point of departure, and twisted and subverted it into something far darker and more ominous than either Synge or O'Casey ever wrote (at least, as far as I know).
Let's start right there with the language. That musical Irish/English speech has a cadence and rhythm so pronounced that, even if the actors don't attempt an accent, you can come away convinced that they in fact spoke with one. In a way, they did. Consider a line like, "Is it me it is that you're meaning?" The music and the consequent accent are built in at least half way just by the sequence and arrangement of the words. But the Peterborough company did in fact go thoroughly for accents, and very clearly and convincingly too, for my money. I've never seen or read the play, but I doubt I missed more than a mere handful of words in its 2 1/2 hour span.
The set was a grimy and grubby cottage kitchen-living room in one space, and looked very much lived in. More detailing might have made it look even more poverty-stricken, but still it created an effective space and atmosphere, with much attention to detail. It was carefully adapted to this stage so that all main acting areas were clearly visible even from the side seats of the auditorium.
The structure of the play actually reminded me of a major symphonic composer, Bruckner, whose works are built over long spans through a series of wave-like climaxes that just keep getting bigger and more overwhelming on each wave. It's a nice analogy because, unlike some plays, the cast can pour it on during the build-up to each successive climax, then take the quieter pause-like section that follows, and then begin the next big build-up. Also, like Bruckner, the biggest, most breathtaking climax of all was followed by a long, quiet passage -- but this scene was not a resting point at all, it was rather a freeze-frame of the gripping climax of the entire story.
The central character is Maureen Folan, played by Alex Saul. She's a fortysomething woman stuck in the role of caregiver and housekeeper to her mother, Mag Folan (Patricia Young) -- an incredibly cranky hypochondriac, with the conniving heart of a snake where protecting her own interests is concerned. As the play opens, we sense that Maureen is at the end of her rope in dealing with her mother, and later on we find out just how true that is as Maureen's grasp on reality begins to slip away from her. Her lapses into madness mark out the successive climaxes of the play, and the challenge to the performer is how to convincingly capture those periodic descents into breakdown without brazenly signalling them to the audience.
Alex Saul gave an amazing performance shaded in hundreds of separate degrees of intensity, so that the line was never clearly marked -- we just became aware in each case that Maureen had already passed the point of no return. A true tour de force.
Mag, as the tormentor who spurs on those periodic breakdowns, has to play as close to a one-note samba as any character I recall seeing in any play. Learning her lines must be a large challenge because she says the same things, or slight variations on them, over and over and over and over. Patricia Young kept a firm grip on the character at all times, and the look of cunning that stole over her face whenever she thought herself unobserved spoke volumes about this supposedly "helpless" woman's true abilities in self-protection.
The other two characters are the two adult brothers Dooley, from across the way. We meet Ray Dooley first (Luke Foster), a streetwise man with a raw street vocabulary and a dead-end life that no doubt fuels his anger. He comes bringing Mag the message that there will be a farewell party for their relatives from the USA who are returning home, and that Mag and Maureen will be welcome to come. Despite her mother's conniving, Maureen finds out, goes to the party, meets Pato Dooley (Scott Drummond) and brings him home, partly to begin to have a life for herself, and partly to torment her mother. Pato is everything his brother is not: gentle, kind, considerate and thoughtful, but still very much a man.
Drummond did a first-rate job of expressing his bewilderment when Maureen turned on him and exploded at him. Also excellent was his reading of the letter he writes to her before he leaves for Boston himself.
Foster's anger and bafflement in the final scene were likewise impressive. This last scene serves only one dramatic purpose, and that is to show that Maureen has now become her mother in effect. Since her every word and action in the last few minutes demonstrates that, it actually seemed to me pretty superfluous for the playwright to have Ray Dooley say so.
All of that is just words. Only a live performance could give you the feel for the sheer breathtaking quality of this show, the intensity which had people gasping for air at the end of nearly every scene. If there were an award for "Most Gripping Performance -- the show that just won't let you go", I'd say it would have to go to this company. For me, this was the ultimate experience of what has been, throughout, a very intense week of gripping theatre. Kudos to the Peterborough Theatre Guild and to their director, Jerry Allen.
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