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Misery, turmoil, lies, more misery, and a bit of onstage torture thrown in for good measure. The Beauty Queen of Leenane is not a happy play. In fact, Martin McDonagh’s script is so unrelenting in  its misery that you are left unsure who you are supposed to empathise with. It is also quite, quite gripping, and scattered with enough (blackly) comic moments to keep the audience absorbed.

I physically recoiled at two points (I won’t spoil the story – you’ll know which points if you go and see it), so completely absorbing was the story. The cast of four are all superlative, playing out the claustrophobic nuances of rural life, trapped in relationships from the unfulfilling to the downright unhealthy. Both Joe Hill-Gibbons’s direction and McDonagh’s script are subtle and highly intelligent: we are shown the ins and outs of Maureen (Derbhle Crotty) and Mag’s (Rosaleen Lineham) mutually destructive relationship in the first five minutes of stage time.

Hill-Gibbons keeps his audience guessing; both mother (Mag) and daughter (Maureen) are morally ambiguous, although both thoroughly unpleasant. Watching Mag’s malicious attempts to sabotage Maureen’s life and hopes, we begin to sympathise with Crotty’s down-trodden Maureen. Then the power balance subtly shifts, and we are left wincing at her callousness and cruelty. It is not comfortable veiwing, and it gets bleaker as the evening progresses.

Ultz’s  clever set was detailed in the extreme, perfectly capturing the suffocating, decaying lives being played out in rural Leenane. The wistfulness that Mag and Maureen feel when the other two characters (Frank Laverty and Johnny Ward) leave their run-down dwelling is palpable, as they are left alone with each other and their bad memories.

The script has echoes of Beckett – the trapped figures in one space, circling each other, sniping and grumbling. But here it is not physical barriers that keep them inside or together, but emotional ties that bind and drag them down. At the end of the play, you are left unsure who to believe, what is real and what is fantasy. There is no redemption here, no chance of escape: Hill-Gibbons emphasises that this cycle will not be broken, that Maureen is bound to turn into Mag, that hope is short-lived and fleeting. Bleak, but brilliant.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane is currently on tour before returning to the Young Vic Theatre. For more information and tickets see the website here.

Kafka’s Monkey, Young Vic Studio, 28th March 2009.

This 40-minute one-woman show was one of the most arresting and disturbing pieces of theatre I have seen. Kathryn Hunter was superb as Red Peter, the monkey who apes humans in order to escape from captivity. She was frighteningly flexible, and managed to lumber around the stage, knuckles scraping the ground, with the kind of grace one would expect from a real animal. The hours she has spent studying monkeys’ movement have paid off. It was incredible, but this tiny woman in a baggy tuxedo just was a monkey, from her hesitant entrance clutching a suitcase to her shuffling exit.

Kafka’s story is short, and highly satirical, mocking the gap that humans like to put between themselves and animals. Red Peter learns first by mimicking the sailors who have captured him, and soon learns to spit and drink rum – thus, according to Kafka, attaining the level of the average European. Ouch. This is not comfortable stuff to watch, and I don’t just mean Hunter’s effortless splits. Colin Teevan’s adaptation pulls no punches, and the audience are made complicit in the suffering of Red Peter as fellow human beings. The audience, referred to throughout as “members of the academy”, are treated as the audience of a lecture, which Peter is delivering, on how he became human. Hunter brilliantly captures a creature who is now neither one thing nor the other: despite repeated assurances that Peter could not return to his previous state even if he wanted to, there are many lapses in his human behaviour – picking fleas from a well-dressed lady in the front row, for example. Walter Meierjohann has directed delicately, emphasising the animalistic tendencies of the humanised monkey. The bleakness with which Peter views his new life throws human values and the trappings of civilised society into stark relief, and his descriptions of copulating with a female of his species for the sake of forgetting for a short while are desperately sad.

The piece is necessarily short, Hunter may seem super-human but she was clearly exhausted by the end, and the original story is not long. However, it packs more into those forty minutes than many plays do in three hours. It is as good a test of a playwright’s craft as the short story is of the novelist, and Kafka and Teevan both come out of this production flying high. The star, of course, is Hunter, who gives a truly stunning performance as Red Peter. Her physical transformation, from spiky haircut to prehensile toes, was astonishing, and her careful speech and quiet dignity made it all-to-easy to see the small step from monkey to human.

The free tickets scheme for under-26s launches on Monday. My colleague and I are already plotting our assault on the website, and have every intention of getting as many freebies as is humanly possible. I will be blogging on our experiences – how easy/hard it is to actually get hold of tickets, how different theatres are handling the scheme, whether what we see is any good – on the ArtsProfessional website, and as usual, would welcome comments and information on other people’s experiences, too.

I am not filled with hope at the moment, I have to say. Call me a cynic, but there’s just not enough money behind it to give away tickets without damaging theatres’ revenue. I know that makes me hypocritical for using and abusing the system, but it’s free! And I’ve only not been a student for sixth months, and free stuff makes me happy. Very happy. I’ve noticed already, though, that the Young Vic are limiting people to one booking per year (although you can book up to six tickets at a time, provided each ticket goes to a named under-26 who turns up on the night with ID), and The National’s link from the Arts Council’s website doesn’t work and its own website strangely carries no mention of it. The National, the RSC and the Young Vic all already do their own cheap ticket deals (The National’s Travelex tickets are a tenner, and available to anyone, the RSC do £5 tickets for every show on a first-come first-served basis with at least ten available on the day, and the Young Vic offer £5 to Southwark residents and £10 to students and under-26s anyway), and it will be interesting to see whether these have more or fewer takers. I hope that people who try and book a freebie and miss out will be tempted to book for a small fee anyway, but we shall see.

I’m slightly annoyed that I’ve already booked, for real money, almost everything that I want to see at participating theatres in the next few months, but I only have myself to blame. There’s some good stuff coming up at the National, and a free ticket makes the prospect of paying the train fare to London and dashing to catch the last train home again much more appealing. I’m still upset that the only venue in Cambridge that’s participating is The Junction, when everything good seems to be at the Arts Theatre, especially given that the Arts Theatre’s student/young person reductions are pitiful and never seem to apply to anything I want to see. On a tangential note, the worst culprit for student deals that I have come across is the Theatre Royal, Bath, which takes a quid off prices. A whole quid. Unsurprisingly, it is not offering freebies, either.