TESSA Worlsey will be performing at York Theatre Royal for the first time and yet she is on familiar ground.

"This is the second time I've played old Mag Folan, because I did the role at the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme, two and a half or three years ago," she says.

The play, Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, makes that kind of impact. The West End loved it, Broadway loved it, bestowing it with four Tony awards, and Tessa loved it.

"So when my agent saw it was coming up in York, she put me up for the audition. It's a different theatre - the Theatre Royal has a proscenium arch, the New Vic is a theatre-in-the-round - and it's an entirely different cast, and I've never done a part twice before," says Tessa, who is of a similar age to 70-year-old Mag.

"I thought I might be stuck on certain things, but I've found that there are new things to bring out, and it's a rare privilege to do it again. Sometimes you just know in interviews that you're going to get on with the director's way of thinking; sometimes you know it's not going to be for you; and I knew this was right for me."

In the macabre comic tale of Beauty Queen, Mag Folan and her spinster daughter Maureen - the beauty queen of the title - live together in the hills of Connemara, and their already strained relationship is put under ultimate stress when manipulative Meg interferes with her daughter's final chance of love.

"Mag is a monster but doesn't know it really, though in some ways she does. She's a manipulator; her two older daughters, Annette and Margo, have left home and don't have anything to do with her, but Maureen has stuck with her, and now she's coming up to 40," Tessa says.

"Maureen looks after her, and Mag demands and demands and because she's so terrified of being alone she manipulates all the time to keep her daughter there - and she's witty, this old girl, enjoying herself using that wit manipulatively in certain situations."

Tessa loves McDonagh's writing. "Being a McDonagh play, it's inevitable that something will happen between the two women, and it does. The play must have been festering in his mind for some time. It took only eight days, I think, to write and there's not a spare word in it.

"It's a very unusual, very different format that he's discovered. He's been able to take the claustrophobia of living in a place like Leenane, an inlet from the ocean, surrounded by mountains, right at the top of Galway, and convey that in the relationship."

Four years ago at the Bolton Octagon, Tessa played Mary Johnny Rafferty in A Skull In Connemara, the second play in a McDonagh trilogy, and she took the opportunity to visit Connemara.

"I decided to take in some of the ambience and find out what it was like to live there. It's wet and it's boggy and people are 'strange' in that it's a very enclosed community: though they welcome strangers, they don't have much to do with them," Tessa says. "Yet it's a compelling area, an area you want to return to."

Just like Tessa wanted to return to The Beauty Queen Of Leenane.

The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, York Theatre Royal, November 9 to 27. Tickets: £3.50 to £17.50 on 01904 623568.

Charles Hutchinson

Updated: 16:09 Thursday, November 04, 2004