MARTIN McDonagh has the Midas touch. Written in eight days in his Camberwell flat, his first play, The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, catapulted him to fame in London's West End with its Irish blend of comedy and grand melodrama.

Within two years, he had become the first playwright since William Shakespeare to have four of his plays produced professionally in London in a single season.

Winner of four Tony Awards in New York, Beauty Queen begins a repertory run at York Theatre Royal on November 9 in a co-production between the theatre and company-in-residence Pilot Theatre.

Set in rural County Galway in the hills of Connemara, McDonagh's drama is a witty story of love, lust and rainfall in a windswept Irish cottage.

Maureen Folan, spinster daughter of old Mag Folan, has known no other life except caring for her ailing mother. She dreams of lust, love and excitement in a world beyond the four walls.

When manipulative Mag inter-feres with her daughter's final chance of love, Maureen decides there is a thin line between love and hate.

Pilot's artistic director Marcus Romer is directing the show. "The play is actually a contemporary piece but with echoes of Fifties and Sixties' kitchen-sink drama, so Mag and Maureen have a modern kettle and a really old stove and nothing has been thrown away. In Liam Doona's set, there's a Morris Minor sinking into the ground and that's partly a metaphor for what's happening in the play. Things are being left to rot, and they're so isolated where they live," he says.

"It's a bit like Father Ted in that Leenane is similar to Craggy Island, and it's also funny in the way Steptoe And Son is funny but tragic in the way Steptoe And Son is. It's Steptoe without the grimness."

Analysing the theme of Beauty Queen, Marcus says: "It's about that dividing line between love and hate, and when looking after elderly parents it's a very, very thin line. Mother and daughter argue like cats and dogs and sometimes that's funny but it's also dark in that the possessive mother wants to keep things as they were.

"She doesn't want to move into an old people's home and she doesn't want her daughter to have a relationship with anyone else. The daughter's fear is that she will end up like her mother, and that's exactly how she has ended up."

McDonagh is a Londoner, born in 1971 to Irish stock. That gives him both the outsider and insider's perspective on all things Irish. "He conveys that balance between the biscuit-tin beauty and romance of Ireland and yet the harshness of that West of Ireland coast, and the isolation. All the men have gone to England, or to America, to find a job and so it's very difficult for women to find a love for life," says Marcus, who has Irish grandparents.

He would welcome the opportunity to present all three plays in McDonagh's Leenane trilogy in York. A Skull In Connemara and The Lonesome West must wait, as indeed must his latest hit, The Pillowman, but first Marcus hopes York audiences will relish Beauty Queen.

"It's a contemporary classic, and this is a chance for York to see a zeitgeist piece that has been heralded internationally," Marcus says.

"It's the kind of play where you say 'That's what we've been looking for'. It has all the qualities of British, Irish and European drama and it's in that classic Irish tradition of storytelling: tales of ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances, where it's too wild and windy for trees."

The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, York Theatre Royal, November 9 to 27. Tickets: £3.50 to £17.50 on 01904 623568.

Updated: 15:35 Thursday, October 28, 2004