AN old Morris Minor is sinking into the ground outside their windswept cottage in the Connemara hills. The picture of the Kennedys is fading on the kitchen wall.

Old Mag Folan (Tessa Worsley) is sinking too, possessive and fearful of being alone on the harsh, isolated West Coast, forever hectoring her daughter for Complan without lumps, her morning porridge and a constant flow of tea.

Her sisters long fled from this sterile, stagnating, neglected place, 40-year-old Maureen (Marianne March) is stuck in the family home, tending to her testy mother. She fears sinking and rotting too, aware that life and men in particular are passing her by; her isolation not helped by her mother's tendency to burn letters or 'forget' to pass on messages, brought by young Ray Dooley (Jamie Beamish) on behalf of his older brother, Pato.

She craves lust, love in a little black dress, anything but this stymied life, and building site labourer Pato (Paul M Meston) represents her last-chance saloon. She is his Beauty Queen of Leenane, he says; he is her passage to escape, but manipulative Mag has one last card to play.

Written in 1996 by Martin McDonagh, a Londoner of Irish stock, Beauty Queen is a contemporary Irish tale of love and passion, temporary insanity and permanent impotence, with the ghost of Fifties and Sixties' kitchen-sink drama in its rafters.

It is a devastating piece, one that rises to violence, and yet director Marcus Romer rightly judges that Mag should not be a one-note, sour old bag. The relationship between physically weak, needy mother and mentally erratic, stultified daughter is redolent of Steptoe And Son, with shards of humour and a darkening undertow of tragedy, superbly brought to the scalding boil by Worsley and March.

McDonagh's writing is wonderful, tender and harsh, brittle and beautiful all at once, never more so than in Pato's heartbreaking, revealing letter of hope and fears to Maureen (a brilliant monologue scene from Meston), and the performances are mesmerising on Liam Doona's evocative open-plan cottage design. Not least Beamish's restless Ray, and unlike Ray, Beamish is going places.

As Delia Murphy's old Irish song Spinning Wheel slips into the ether, the applause drowns the closing credits (delivered in the manner of a radio drama). You will be seeing it now, will you not?

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Updated: 11:20 Friday, November 12, 2004