Do any of the characters in The Beauty Queen of Leenane have clear-cut objectives? Certainly, but after reading the play my first impression was that their only objective was to be as cruel and destructive to one another as possible. There’s a note of honesty to this: human experience, after all, is colored with cruelty and nastiness. Still, my general take on life is that no one ever acts thinking that they’re making the worst possible choice. There has to be some kind of motivation for their actions that makes sense to them.

Take, for example, Maureen. Not only because this is, essentially, her play, but also because her motives seem the most difficult to grasp. What could possibly motivate a woman to [*spoiler alert- go read the play*] dump boiling hot oil over her elderly mother’s helpless (helpless?) body, and then beat her to death with a fire poker?

The same motivation, I think, that drove her to flaunt her newly-discovered sexual currency around Mag’s kitchen, and the same motivation that led her to steal Ray’s tennis ball as a child and never give it back, even though she never used it.

Maureen, as a character, has an insatiable need to be paid attention to and valued.

Her driving objective is to feel important, as if her disappearance would mean something, as if her presence leaves a tangible impact on those around her. As a forty-year-old unmarried woman trapped living at home with her manipulative, elderly mother, and as a woman who has suffered from serious psychological problems in a country that does not have an empathetic understanding of mental illness, she has been dealing with feelings of insufficiency and self-loathing for most, if not all, of her life.

With the hand of cards Maureen has been dealt, if she wants to have an impact on the lives of others around her, it’s far easier to be destructive than productive. If she was already struggling with depression as a child, she would perhaps not have been able to play with Ray and his friends, but she could easily steal his tennis ball to ensure that he knew she was there. The moment she finds herself wanted and valued by Pato, she absolutely glories in the fact, taking the time to rub it in her mother’s face, to deliberately prove her wrong. As a woman, unmarried, suffering from mental illness, and not particularly beautiful to boot, Maureen is left with no cultural capital to her name. Whatever attention she wants, she has to create herself.

Of course, this leaves the minor, slightly troubling fact that Maureen murders her mother at the end of the play. How can one reconcile this with Maureen’s driving objective?

Mag took Maureen for granted. She relied on her to make her porridge, feed the chickens, interact with the outside world. If Maureen wanted nothing more than to be noticed as a human being, Mag changed her into a piece of furniture: useful, but nothing more. The motives for Mag’s behavior on this note are complex and should be considered that way: she has plenty to gain for keeping her daughter around the house forever, in her mind. But at some point, Mag’s constant thwarting of Maureen’s projects to matter, to make a difference, becomes too much for her to bear. If her mother never considers that Maureen can have an impact on her life, at the very least Maureen can have an impact on the ending of it.

MacDonogh’s characters aren’t three-dimensional so much as they operate in a world where yes and no, right and wrong, ‘tis and ‘tisn’t, do not exist as mutually exclusive. Maureen can be sympathetic and a horrifying, disgusting murderer, all at the same moment. She can be motiveless in her evil and motivated in her actions, all at the same time. She can be plain as the day is long and still, in a way, be the Beauty Queen of Leenane.