ABSTRACT
I must offer a minority opinion about Martin McDonagh’s raved-over Beauty Queen of Leenane. The accomplished director Garry Hynes first produced the play at the Druid Theatre Company, which she founded, and it marked Mr. McDonagh’s bright professional debut at the not so tender age of twenty-three. His writing is too self-assured for him to give a damn about his relative inexperience. But I don’t think The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a good play, let alone the great and memorable Gothic drama we’re told it is. To which its many admirers may well respond, “Ah, bollocks to ya!”—as the drama’s doomed heroine likes to say.
