The Beauty Queen of Leenane is such a brilliantly structured, tightly wound play that it keeps you on tenterhooks even if you’ve seen it before and know what’s coming. At the opening night of the new, stunning Sydney Theatre Company production you could hear audible gasps, intakes of breath and barely suppressed groans from the audience as playwright Martin McDonagh turned the screws.

Yael Stone and Noni Hazlehurst. Photograph © Brett Boardman

Premiered by Ireland’s Druid Theatre Company in 1996, it was the debut play for McDonagh, the renowned Anglo-Irish writer who would go on to write other darkly comic dramas including The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman, as well as screenplays for the films In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane is set in a remote Irish cottage, which smells of urine for reasons you’ll discover, where 40-year-old virgin Maureen Folan (Yael Stone) and her demanding mother Mag (Noni Hazlehurst) live together in a destructive, co-dependent relationship. They clearly enjoy baiting each other and are locked in a daily battle in their isolated, impoverished world where biscuits, unstirred Complan and hand-delivered letters...