One of the most successful plays of the 1990’s and the winner of numerous awards, The Beauty Queen of Leenane is an enticingly wicked blend of black comedy, melodrama, horror and bleak tragedy. The story is set in an Irish village, Leenane in County Connemara in the early 1990’s.

Enter Maureen Folan, forty-something spinster and primary caregiver to her seventy year-old, conniving mother Mag. Maureen’s sisters have long ago escaped into marriages and family lives of their own however Maureen, with a history of mental illness, is trapped in a co-dependent and horribly dysfunctional relationship with her mother.

The Folan cottage receives numerous intriguingly comical visits from the Dooley brothers, Pato and Ray. Pato, a sweetly romantic middle-aged construction worker is fed up with life’s loneliness and disappointments. Ray, his dramatically younger brother, a pathetically non-threatening, verbally undisciplined ‘bad boy’, is also bored, in his own special way, with the tedious repetition of their day-to-day existence.

The glimmer of a last-chance romance between Maureen and Pato sparks up and the games are on. The plot, full of deceptions, secrets and betrayals interspersed with dizzying twists and turns, keeps the audience guessing and second guessing. Hopes are constantly raised, only to be dashed and raised again.  Grab a ticket, the rollercoaster awaits!