A house perched on a hill on the outskirts of Leenane. In the Connemara region of northwest Ireland. In the mid-1990s, Mag Folan and her daughter Maureen have been living alone for twenty years. Her two other married daughters live far from Leenane, and Maureen, who remains single at over forty, has to take care of her mother’s food and other needs, despite her limited mobility and a badly injured hand.

Their respective characters, tainted by silences and lies, and marked by domestic routines, a tense and repressive mother-daughter relationship, traumatic events from the recent past, and a history of mutual harm that will be revealed throughout the action, will be altered by a local episode: the eventual return to Leenane of Pato Dooley, who works as a laborer in London, for a family farewell party for an uncle returning to America after his vacation.
This circumstance will lead to the reunion of Pato and Maureen, which will provoke evident displeasure in the old woman, as well as a chain of situations between mother and daughter with dramatic consequences. The visit to Mag and Maureen’s house will also be made by Ray Dooley, Pato’s younger brother, a young man with limited social and professional prospects. On the one hand, the romantic relationship that develops between Pato and Maureen after the party, in addition to infuriating Mag, creates a state of self-deception in Maureen and a sharp confrontation with her mother.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, the mother’s concealment of news, messages, and a letter—especially one in which Pato proposes that Maureen join him in Boston—leads to a violent outcome, the setting of which remains the unchanged living room-kitchen-dining room of the house.