The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays Book

Rounded down mainly because the middle play is weak, but the other two are fabulous. I've been a long-time fan of McDonagh's writing, and this book comprises the Leenane Trilogy, some of his earliest plays. I've never seen stageplays interwoven like this: they're set in the same small town, where everyone knows everyone and repercussions/characters are offhand mentioned in subsequent plays, and you really get a sense of this being a real place with real people all trapped in a claustrophobic fishbowl together. It's like an interlinked anthology, with Easter eggs scattered between the works if you've read/seen all three plays, and even recurring jokes in the first two set up for some payoff in the third. It's remarkable, and makes it a delight to read all three back-to-back.

Since this was such an early work, you can see McDonagh hammering out his craft and developing his toolkit: Chekov's guns galore; dramatic irony re: what is or isn't known; the audience's imagination filling in the blanks horrifically; unreliable characters; dark pasts and unexpected turns; long epistolary letters narrated.

The trilogy centers on toxic families, pettiness, and vengeance. As is his tradition, it's incredibly dark but also incredibly darkly funny (particularly THE LONESOME WEST); there are glimmers of occasional hope, but because this is McDonagh, they're obviously gonna be squashed.

THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE
The only one of these three that I'd seen performed beforehand, and also my favourite of the three (when I saw it, it left me feeling pretty lost and sad). It centers on the poisonous relationship between a spinster and the elderly mother she's trapped looking after: the weary abuse between them, the sense of old fights repeated over and over and looping until it hits a breaking point. It's bittersweet, melancholy, wistful. My heart aches. Plus Pato Dooley is the softest, sweetest character I've ever encountered in a McDonagh text, and I love him:
MAUREEN (quietly): It's true I was in a home there a while, now, after a bit of a breakdown I had. Years ago this is.

PATO: What harm a breakdown, sure? Lots of people do have breakdowns.

MAUREEN: A lot of doolally people, aye.

PATO: Not doolally people at all. A lot of well-educated people have breakdowns too. In fact, if you're well-educated it's even more likely. Poor Spike Milligan, isn't he forever having breakdowns? He hardly stops. I do have trouble with me nerves every now and then, too, I don't mind admitting. There's no shame at all in that. Only means you do think about things, and take them to heart.
A SKULL IN CONNEMARA
The weakest. There's a couple good reveals, but the central twist/conflict is a little ham-handed compared to McDonagh's usual, and the ending just sort of peters out. I also had the trouble that, since I was reading rather than watching it performed, I couldn't tell the dialogue apart that easily since 3/4 characters' names started with M (Mick, Mairtin, Maryjohnny).

THE LONESOME WEST
The funniest. It was great finally meeting Father Welsh Walsh Welsh after so long; he was also one of my favourite characters. His horror and exasperation at his disaster of a parish, dogged by murders and suicides, and his last hope of redemption in trying to reconcile two squabbling brothers, Coleman and Valene -- whose extreme pettiness is astounding and morbidly hilarious. Poor, poor Welsh. Walsh. (It actually reminded a bit of Rickety Cricket in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in terms of the earnest priest whose life is systematically destroyed by a group of terrible people.)


Anyway, do read these plays if you're a fan of dark humour and twisted plots and seeing how toxic families combust. It's good stuff.