The Grotesque Atrides in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane

Abstract

The first staging of Martin McDonagh’s play The Beauty Queen of Leenane received extreme praise and box-office success, but this accomplishment was overshadowed by some contradictory comments regarding the playwright’s attitude towards Irish identity and culture. This study aims to argue that the Irish-born dramatist engages with the grotesque conventions while depicting the image of native land, culture, and societal norms. In order to achieve this, our study reveals the ways in which McDonagh’s play interacts with the myth of Atrides, Wolfgang Kayser’s notion of grotesque, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of carnivalesque and grotesque, as well as Julia Kristeva’s state of abject, which are used by the playwright to expose the societal anxieties related to the issues of identity, motherhood, emigration, and rootedness. Eventually, in the collision between mythical matrix and the grotesque depictions, McDonagh raises the spectators’ awareness of the necessity of some individual and societal reforms.