ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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A brilliantly tense play
A compelling story of how cruelty begets cruelty, and of how the child becomes the parent, writes PETER MASON
Orla Fitzgerald as Maureen and Adam Best as Pato
[Helen Maybanks]
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Beauty Queen of Leenane
Lyric Hammersmith, London
SET in the west of Ireland and first staged in 1996, Martin McDonagh’s Beauty Queen of Leenane centres around 40-year-old Maureen, angry and depressed at having to look after her manipulative, ailing mother as the rain falls ceaselessly outside their run-down home in Connemara.
Momentarily Maureen’s drab isolation is relieved as she stumbles into a night of awkward romance with neighbour Pato, who has returned briefly from a labouring job in England.
But when her selfish mother contrives to put the kybosh on their putative relationship, there are bitter consequences all round.
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