Tag Archives: Julia Flatley

The Beauty Queen Of Leenane

★★★★

The Tower Theatre

Beauty Queen Of Leenane

The Beauty Queen Of Leenane

The Tower Theatre

Reviewed – 7th November 2019

★★★★

 

“Waggott’s ability to balance frailty and seeming harmlessness with taloned cruelty is quite spectacular”

 

Martin McDonagh has made quite a name for himself in the past few years as a connoisseur of pitch-black humour and crooked characters. Whilst he’s become a household name for major screenplays such as In Bruges and Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, his ability to make an entire audience laugh at the most heinous crimes, and then to gasp at their own inhumanity, is showcased most spectacularly in the theatre.

Having climbed to such great heights as casting Jim Broadbent in the starring role of his most recent West End production, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, it’s quite a treat to go back to McDonagh’s first play and see where he began, and indeed where his twisted sense of humour and humanity first came to fruition.

At forty years old, Maureen (Julia Flatley) still lives with her seemingly ailing mother, Mag (Amanda Waggott), in Leenane, a small Irish village. Embittered by the cards she’s been dealt, Maureen spends her days snapping at her mother and telling her of her fantasies of finding her corpse on the kitchen table. Mag seems little concerned by her daughter’s misery and isolation, and appears to want her to stay forever, regardless.

But at a party at the neighbours’, Maureen reconnects with an old crush, the neighbours’ son Pato (Nick Cannon), and she dares to wonder that there might be a way out of her miserable and lonely existence after all. That is if her mother doesn’t have anything to say on the matter.

The set (Philip Ley) is detailed but traditional, allowing the psychological gymnastics of the script, rather than an overly complex design, to do the talking. The entire story takes place in Maureen and Mag’s kitchen-living room, the room in which they spend the majority of their days, and you can feel the sense of crushing claustrophobia by which Maureen is tormented, and which Mag depends upon, like a crusty old corset.

Waggott’s ability to balance frailty and seeming harmlessness with taloned cruelty is quite spectacular, and Flatley is an equally armed adversary. There’s a natural desire to find the villain in this story, but both are so twisted and yet so tormented, it’s impossible to pick a side.

In stark contrast, Cannon’s open-faced, sweet nature seems completely foreign in this household. Bringing a little levity to the plot, he’s a pleasant reminder that this room isn’t the whole world, and that not everyone is full of rancor and vitriol.

Simon Brooke, playing Pato’s petulant younger brother, is plenty energetic, but he could do with toning it down a tiny bit, just so that when he’s really losing his patience, or being especially sulky, we can tell.

For the first half, I don’t know that I saw much of what I have come to recognise as McDonagh hallmarks, but as the story unravels, so too does the web of miseries and mishaps, and, most disquietingly, somehow we’re laughing at it all. The Beauty Queen of Leenane, as directed by Colette Dockery, is perhaps more subtle than his most recent works, but it is just as disturbingly sadistic, and perniciously potent.

 

Reviewed by Miriam Sallon

Photography by Robert Piwko

 


The Beauty Queen Of Leenane

The Tower Theatre until 16th November

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
To Kill a Mockingbird | ★★★½ | October 2018
Table | ★★★★ | November 2018
The Seagull | ★★★ | November 2018
Talk Radio | ★★★½ | March 2019
Happy Days | ★★★★★ | April 2019
Little Light | ★★★ | June 2019

 

Click here to see our most recent reviews

 

Table

Table
★★★★

The Tower Theatre

Table

Table

The Tower Theatre

Reviewed – 22nd November 2018

★★★★

“staging makes inventive use of the emblematic, central table while creative lighting enhances dramatic moments”

 

Weaving through six generations over 115 years, ‘Table’ follows the Best family’s journey from the end of the 19th century to the present day. The solid, polished table, crafted by David Best in Lichfield in 1898, travels with them through two world wars, to a missionary post in Tanganyika in the 1950s, back to a sixties commune in Herefordshire and, finally, to south London; it plays a part in birth, death, games, discussions and decisions, and is witness to the thousands of meals which have brought everyone together, its scars a cryptic memoir. The central figure is Gideon, born illegitimately in Africa to a missionary nun, and briefly brought up there, then in a hippie commune, but his alternative past leaves an indelible mark and he eventually abandons his own wife and son. Tanya Ronder’s sharp, touching dialogue knits non-linear scenes together to draw us into their history on a very personal level, sympathising and empathising with the many engaging characters.

Director, Simona Hughes, achieves a sense of fluidity as the different eras superimpose, using hymns, African folk tunes and children’s songs (Music – Colin Guthrie) to link the changes of time and place. Her staging makes inventive use of the emblematic, central table while creative lighting (Alan Wilkinson) enhances dramatic moments and colours tableaux. Philip Ley’s set design highlights the epochs with simple variations of tablecloths and crockery and the costumes (Anna Pearshouse) are aptly descriptive, if somewhat patchy for the hippie commune.

The cast of nine double and triple up on the 23 roles with accomplished clarity. In particular, Dickon Farmar as Gideon takes us movingly through the agony of his childhood and Rebecca Allan’s Sarah, Gideon’s mother, slowly transforms from innocence to disillusionment. Kayne McCutcheon gives excellent interpretations of Gideon’s son, Anthony, weighed down with the anxiety of growing up with an absent father, and of Finlay, his great-grandfather who, tormented by the war, punishes his nearest and dearest. Su-Lin (Yuyu Wang) is a breath of fresh air and hope as the final tensions rise, but it is Nicholas Cannon as Albert, Sarah’s twin, who truly moves us as he paints a painfully distressing contrast to his bubbly nature as a child and is left by both his sister and his mother to care for his disabled father, unable to express his own desires in the repressive fifties.

Tower Theatre Company offers an enjoyable evening of fine acting, if sometimes slightly slack in pace, with some self-contained fragments of drama but not one culminating point to shape the play. Not often seen in the theatre, it is a wide-angled slice of history. Without sending out a powerful message, ‘Table’ strikes a poignant note about the emotional baggage we inherit and how, unconsciously, we pass that on.

 

Reviewed by Joanna Hetherington

Photography by Robert Piwko

 

The Tower Theatre

Table

The Tower Theatre until 1st December

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
To Kill a Mockingbird | ★★★½ | October 2018
The Seagull | ★★★ | November 2018

 

Click here to see more of our latest reviews on thespyinthestalls.com