The romance between Pato and Maureen has a whiff of Tennessee Williams’s sexual yearning and dreams of escape, with some fine acting between Best and Fitzgerald. Rachel O’Riordan directs a major revival of this darkly comic, award-winning play by Martin McDonagh ( Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; The Lieutenant of Inishmore), starring Adam Best ( Giri/Haji), Ingrid Craigie ( Roadkill; The Cripple of Inishmaan), Orla Fitzgerald ( The Young Offenders) and Kwaku Fortune ( Line of Duty; Normal People). Much has changed in Ireland since Martin McDonagh’s black comedy premiered in 1996, but the ramshackle Connemara hillside where this savage mother-daughter psychodrama plays out feels both petrified in perpetual darkness and newly, terribly, resonant. She claims Mag sometimes tries to tell lies about the past, thinking Maureen is unable to discern them from reality.

However, it soon becomes clear that Maureen imagined her reunion with Pato; he actually left by taxi without ever seeing Maureen, and is now engaged to a woman with whom he danced at the party. Maureen has given him instructions to make himself known, and she, too, comes out in only her underwear.Set in the mountains of Connemara, County Galway, The Beauty Queen of Leenane tells the darkly comic tale of Maureen Folan, a plain and lonely woman in her early forties, and Mag, her manipulative ageing mother, whose interference in Maureen's first and possibly final chance of a loving relationship sets in motion a train of events that leads inexorably toward the play's terrifying denouement. He fields not one but two undelivered letters, a melodramatic ploy Thomas Hardy would have enjoyed and one that still makes an audience gasp. It transferred to London's West End, where it opened at the Royal Court Theatre on 29 February 1996.

Maureen has already learnt of the party from Ray, whom she passed on her way in, so she punishes Mag for her dishonesty by forcing her to drink lumpy Complan. But Mag has other ideas; and her interference sets in motion a train of events that leads inexorably towards the play’s breathtaking conclusion. Left alone in the house, Maureen puts on Mag's sweater, sits in her rocking chair, and adopts her mannerisms.The 1999 production was a tour by the Royal Court Theatre Company, appearing at the Adelaide Festival Centre (May – June 1999) and Wharf 1 (July 1999) and directed by Garry Hynes. The electric kettle, the packets of Complan and the absence of mobile phones allow you to put a more precise date on it, but the appeal of The Beauty Queen of Leenane lies partly in its timelessness. Seizing on it, Maureen tortures Mag with hot oil until she confesses the letter's existence and contents.