Nov 21, 2008
The Beauty Queen of Leenane | The Beauty Queen of Leenane
At a glance:
- Author: Martin McDonagh
- First Published: 1996
- Type of Plot: Realism; comedy
- Time of Work: The 1980’s
- Setting: Leenane, a town in western Ireland
- Principal Characters: Maureen Folan, Mag Folan, Pato Dooley, Ray Dooley
- Genres: Realism, Drama, Women’s literature, Comedy
- Subjects: Mothers, Parents and children, Twentieth century, Domestic violence, Jealousy, envy, or resentment, Mental illness, Violence, Fratricide, parricide, or filicide, Ireland or Irish people, Mental health
- Locales: Ireland
The Play
In The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Mag Folan wages a relentless and petty war with
her forty-year-old daughter, Maureen, a spinster, who lives in lonely isolation with her
semi-invalid mother in a small cottage in the remote Irish community of Leenane. The two
women have developed a mutually dependent relationship in which each vies for superiority
over the other, both bound to an emotionally empty, dead-end life. Mag constantly accuses
Maureen of neglecting her, and the daughter accuses her mother of faking illness in an effort to
keep her home. Pato Dooley, a...
[The entire page is 2100 words long]
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