HEAVEN
HEAVEN, Bitchen Wolf at Qtopia, The Loading Dock, 16-31 May 202. Photography by Alex Vaughan
Eugene O’Brien’s 2022 play won the Irish Times Award for Best New Play before picking up The Scotsman’s “Fringe First Award”, and rave notices in New York, Dublin and Edinburgh. It’s easy to see why in Kate Gaul’s beautifully balanced production at Qtopia. The script is illuminating, elliptical, and through two mesmerising performances from Noel Hodda (Mal) and Lucy Miller (Mairead), it casts light, welcome and otherwise, on the dark recesses of a long marriage.
The evening begins with Mairead verbally colouring in the picture of a relationship that was never passionate, but about being good pals. She and Mal are attending a wedding in the small mid-Irish town they long left behind. “I told a lie earlier today,” she says. “The sister asked what it was like to be home. I said great.”
Her sister Laura – the bride-to-be – drives her around town and Mairead’s description of the streetscape is depressing and comical, and would be familiar to most: big box stores, local businesses clinging at the edges, the cinema long gone, talk of hotels and arts centres still just talk while a few vape shops and tattoo parlours tell of the present day.
That all this is plainly visible is a combination of the writing, Miller’s sardonic delivery, and Kate Gaul's imagination-freeing set of a long wooden bench on an otherwise empty stage backed by a shimmer of glittery black hanging. At the same time, Topaz Marlay-Cole’s lighting focuses on the actors and again, leaves it to the audience to conjure pictures: the town, the pub, the wedding guests – all vividly discernible.
The style of alternating – never bisecting – monologues next brings Mal to the stage as he gets ready for the wedding: slips into his suit jacket, dons a nice sky blue tie, all the while looking at the crucifix on the bedroom wall of Coyne’s B&B. It brings him to confessing his chimerical love affair with Jesus of the deep brown eyes and little beard, who had taken him in hand when Mal lifted him down from the cross above the altar when he was a boy. Rewind a few decades, and both playwright and audience would have been heading for eternal damnation and excommunication!
The play’s title can be taken several ways and when, as the rowdy, booze-fuelled celebrations get underway, Mairead claps eyes on her youthful first fuck, Breffni Grehan, and Mal spots a young man who could be his Jesus come to life, and the hitherto ordinary lives begin to unravel in delicately-composed yet muscular prose.
Mairead suddenly longs for what she once knew and is all fire and wet knickers, even as Mal timidly peeps over the parapet of lifelong heterosexual repression and recalls his Jesus-nurtured erections.
Possibly hardest working member of the creative team is Carmen Lysiak whose dialect coaching has Mairead lusciously deep into almost impenetrable Irish brogue, while Mal, as befits his more diffident character, sounds uncannily like Edna O’Brien from time to time; although when he nervously takes his first ever snort of party coke his exclamation of “Jay-zuss” is crackingly authentic.
Altogether, the picture of modern urban and rural Ireland is graphic, while the teasing out of the strands that connect a long relationship, when not unravelling them, is equally intense. For both sides of this passionless marriage, the encounters with temptation and possibility are unexpected. To rediscover desire – for Mairead – is terrifying, thrilling, tragic. The re-ignition of Mal’s boyhood yearning is almost unbearably touching to see.
Heaven is a series of disconcertingly recognisable human questions all based on “what if?” Regret, curiosity, settling for – rather than taking the big leap, and reaching a stage in life and a marriage where the questions just won’t lie down or go away. In just 100 minutes of to-and-fro between Mairead and Mal, we learn much about each partner, about their lives and modern Ireland, and the people. It’s funny when it’s not disturbing, and scarily enlightening if you can bear to look yourself in the eye. Short season of a truly rewarding play and production.
