There?s the mother daughter bond, and then there?s mother-daughter bondage.

That?s the idea behind the Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society?s new production, ?The Beauty Queen of Leenane? by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.

The play opens at the Daylesford Theatre on May 15 and runs until May 20.

?The Beauty Queen of Leenane?, a black comedy, is the first in a trilogy set in Leenane, Connemara, County Galway, Ireland. Others in the series include ?A Skull in Connemara? and ?The Lonesome West?. The writer, Mr. McDonagh was nominated for an Oscar in February in the Best Live Action Short Film category ?Six Shooter?.

?The play is about a woman who is stuck with her mother in the west of Ireland,? said Polly McKie, who plays daughter Maureen. ?Her mother scares away all her potential boyfriends. As a result she is a 40-year-old virgin.?

Andrew Bacon, who plays Ray said Maureen would politely be termed ?loopy?. ?

?Maureen is put in her mother?s care, so she is stuck at home taking care of her geriatric mother,? said Mr. Bacon. ?Sheilagh Robertson is playing the mother, Mag. Mag is the consummate evil granny.?

Ms McKie is from Glasgow, Scotland and has only been on the Island for a short time. This is her first BMDS production.

?I am a drama teacher at the Bermuda High School for Girls, which is one of the reasons I really like getting involved in something like this,? said Ms McKie. ?It is really easy to forget what it is like to be involved in something like this. I ask the girls to do lots of embarrassing things, so it is nice to put myself in the same position that I put them in.?

Ms McKie said that although she gets along well with her mother back in Scotland, she found it easy to relate to Maureen?s plight.

?I think that as soon as I read the play I related to Maureen and I liked her very much,? she said. ?It also helps if I have had a bad day with my own mother, that helps me to get into character more. There are a lot of things that the mother in the play does that are very irritating. It is very mundane stuff. We have all experienced the desire to just tell someone to shut-up, we just want our own space. Maureen doesn?t get any of that. That makes it easier to relate to, the constant niggling.?

Mr. Bacon said one of the good things about the play was that the dialogue is ?absolutely beautiful?.

?This was McDonagh?s first play, and he was very young when he wrote it,? said Mr. Bacon. ?It was a hit in Galway, and then London and then Broadway. Broadway was probably about 1998.?

Mr. Bacon recently directed ?Start?, a play in BMDS? ?Famous for Fifteen Minutes?.

Start was about a guy addicted to video games. It did not win the coveted golden inkwell, but was very popular with the audience.

?The first role is to entertain, and then you can have a message and be smart,? said Mr. Bacon. ?That is why this play, and the role that I am playing, Ray is very appealing me.?

Mr. Bacon said the character of Ray provides comic relief for the ?Beauty Queen of Leenane?.

?Ray naive and a bit simple,? said Mr. Bacon. ?He is still living at home. He moves the plot along. He is a catalyst. He gets things going.?

Mr. Bacon has a special perspective on the play, since he is originally from Dublin, Ireland.

?I think there is an element that is typically Irish to this play,? said Mr. Bacon. ?There is a tradition of black comedy in Ireland. If you look at Oscar Wilde, John Keane, Samuel Beckett, all of them have topics, about depression and loneliness. That is how we deal with it in Ireland; we are miserable but we laugh.?

The fourth and final character in the play, Pat Dooley, is being performed by veteran Bermuda actor Richard Fell. Mr. Bacon said the cast loved working with Mr. Fell, and actually begged director Carol Birch to cast him in the role.

?Carol Birch has done a lovely job directing ?The Beauty Queen of Leenane?,? said Mr. Bacon. ?And the set is wonderful, I swear it looks just like my Auntie Noala?s house in County Tipperary.

?It is a perfect rendition of an Irish country home with brilliant props. There will be some special effects in the play, but I?m not saying what they are. The technical side of the play is really strong.

?Carol says we have ?the dream team? for the technical side of things. All we have to do is show up and take the applause.?

Tickets are $20 each. To order go to www.boxoffice.bm or telephone BMDS at 292-0848.