ABSTRACT
For a dramatist whose unapologetically violent plays have provoked reviews with titles like “Sick-buckets needed in the stalls” and whose The Leenane Trilogy impressed reviewer Matt Wolf as “the scattershot vitriol of a dramatist drowning in his own bile,” Martin McDonagh has been surprisingly insistent in his claim that each of his plays has a “heart” (quoted in Wolf 49). Despite his description of his “idea of theatre” as “some kind of punk destruction of what’s gone on before,” he maintains, when confronted with remarks about his plays’ darkness, that “what the blackness does is allow the heart to shine through” (quoted in Feeney 28, 29). In an interview with Dominic Cavendish, McDonagh repeated this emphasis: “I always like a dark story that’s seemingly heartless, but where there’s a heart, tiny and camouflaged as it might be. I care about the characters an awful lot” (26). Such statements may seem, as Joseph Feeney complains, singularly unhelpful in reading or viewing plays that delight in undercutting any positive identification the audience may be tempted to make with the characters (29). An audience searching for a heart in The Beauty Queen of Leenane may believe they have found it in Maureen Folan, whose verbal abuse of her manipulative mother seems forgivable at first given her dismal existence and history of mental illness. Such illusions are shattered, however, when Maureen punishes her mother’s deceit by calmly pouring a boiling pan of chip fat over her already scalded hand. This pattern, in which characters who initially seem likeable or harmlessly entertaining reveal appalling depths of cruelty, is repeated so often throughout McDonagh’s plays that most audiences and critics abandon the search for any sort of protagonist or moral center and simply enjoy the ruthless and hilarious satire at face value.
