The Keegan Theatre's powerfully entertaining production of Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane is as dark and brutal as a matricidal cock fight.

            McDonagh has the gift for wrapping his characters in claustrophobic normalcy --e.g., what mother and daughter don't have their differences?-- and then unraveling the mundaneness in terrifying increments.  Here he gives us a 40 year old maiden, Maureen Folan (Nanna Ingvarsson), lumbered with a tortuous old hag for a mother (Linda High) and memories of a brief stay in a mental institution. 

            Condemned to a life perfectly encompassed by their drab brown kitchen (with the essential pictures of Jack and Bobby on the wall), Maureen has already slipped back into madness, but only she and her mother know it. The good-natured school mate now grown to become what Maureen considers her last chance at love (Scott Graham) hasn't a clue, and their courting scene is wonderfully charming and awkward, skillfully allying us with Maureen in her desperate fantasy of a real life.

            Director Mark Rhea has elicited outstanding performances from his company, marking that fine line between uneasiness and horror that has become McDonagh's trademark. Ingvarsson's Maureen has already fallen apart and been pasted back together when we meet her, but so skillfully does Ingvarsson play the barely repressed fury of a trapped animal that when Maureen shatters before our eyes the shift from normal to abnormal seems barely a step. As the nightmarish mother who delights in picking at her daughter's emotional scabs, High brings glee and venality to the part in equal measure. Graham's gentle Pato is wonderfully appealing and obtuse and Joe Baker as his floundering brother Ray brings welcome comic relief.