Friday March 29, 2024
HAUNTED
Review

HAUNTED

June 10 2011

HAUNTED, Playhouse Theatre Sydney Opera House, 8-26 June 2011.

The lushly beautiful, misty-voiced and outrageously literary Edna O’Brien burst onto the (by comparison) aridly unromantic scene of ’60s Swinging London with shocking and deliriously attractive force. She enchanted and enraged in equal measure and finally became something of an institution. Over time she moved from forensic explorations of repressed Irish female sexuality to the repression of London suburbia; and that’s where Haunted takes place.

Nevertheless, no matter what O’Brien says or might like to think, the fact is that although you can take the country girl out of Ireland, you really can’t take the country out of the girl. Whether she is writing a play, short story or novel, Edna O’Brien’s prose is distinctive and uncompromising and, despite 50 years living in London, is as lyrical, poetical and musical and un-English as ever. Readers and listeners either love or loathe her; it was ever thus.

Haunted takes place in an odd green abstract of a modest south London home where Mr Berry spends his suspiciously invalid days. The tireless but exhausted Mrs Berry goes off to work each day at a doll factory meanwhile and chatters as loudly as she can to cover the yawning abyss of her marriage and life. The compassionate might call Mr Berry a romantic dreamer; others could be more inclined to give him a kick up the arse and march him to the nearest employment bureau. But in truth, it’s Mrs Berry – Gladys – who is the real romantic and the one, therefore, who gets well and truly kicked by life.

In her author’s notes – which are a must-read because they immediately immerse the reader in classic O’Brien-speak – the playwright tells of “settling none-too-blissfully in outer suburbia, I became fascinated by the hidden lives of those in the forgotten streets, an outward façade of apparent normality, but surely not without many machinations and pipe dreams behind drawn curtains.” She draws vividly on those times and that place to build the fragile world of Haunted, whose title is as hard to grasp as any vague possibility of love and kindness.

The program tells of O’Brien seeing Brenda Blethyn on stage in New York and immediately wanting her to do the play; and, as the much-loved and admired Blethyn teeters and twitters through Gladys’s daily grind and hopeless hopes, it’s easy to see why. Blethyn is able to imbue the silliest woman with the pathos and heart that must still beat within the pouter pigeon bosom. At the same time, there is steel and fire beneath the twin sets and faux pearls and small ambitions (a holiday in Agadir is the Holy Grail for which she is saving her small change) and a frank sensuality that used to find an outlet in “Versailles” – her nickname for the marital bedroom.

HAUNTED

Somewhere along the way, however, O’Brien appears to have found Mr Berry a more interesting or deserving character, especially when his romantic yearnings – aka typical menopausal male fantasies – find fuel in the appearance of young Hazel. She is a strange little thing who gives elocution lessons when not running an antique clothing stall in one street market or another. As Hazel and Mr Berry Beth Cooke and Niall Buggy make a necessarily odd couple. She is naivete personified, while he tries valiantly to keep his hands and his pipe dreams to himself. That the older man’s classic chimera is never realized keeps the play teetering just the right side of acceptability; which may or may not have been the best dramatic idea, but is certainly different. However it doesn’t stop Mrs Berry from developing very sensible suspicions and catching him out in his flimsy yet pathological lies that lead to a spectacular emotional fireworks display as she finally loses it when catching him in flagrante.

Except, of course, Mr Berry is such a non-performer, despite much bluster and poesy, that the flagrante was not only not delicto, it was nothing more than another somewhat creepy fancy on his part. And all of this comes about because, in his eagerness to keep the accidental visitor in his orbit, he invents ever more implausible reasons to do so. He asks Hazel to give him elocution lessons, he gives her items of his wife’s clothing for her stall – including her precious vintage Balenciaga – and even gives himself a more attractive name – “Quincy” – as if it might make her see him as more than a father figure. He also allows Hazel to think he is a lonely widower which makes for more verbal acrobatics as he enmeshes himself ever deeper in lies.

In the end, despite unequal stage time, it’s Brenda Blethyn who holds the piece together and injects it with charm, interest and urgency. Haunted is too long for its own good and it sags when the twice Oscar-nominated star is elsewhere. O’Brien’s fondness and facility for language is also her trap: some sensible editing would have been a good idea. Still, we don’t hear prose like this, nor see a performer like Blethyn, every day of the week – or even once a year – and Haunted is of interest because it demonstrates where the current generation of Irish playwrights have come from. (And as luck would have it, Haunted’s short season is playing just along the walkway from Terminus as we speak: now there’s a fascinating juxtaposition.)

 

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