This is a beautiful play, beautifully presented.
Written by Irish writer Eugene O’Brien, it tells the story of a middle-aged couple at a crisis point, and it does so with humour and insight.
Kate Gaul’s direction is wonderfully simple, unaffected in a way that allows the brilliance of the writing and performance to shine.
The piece is constructed from two intertwining monologues. Husband and wife Mal and Mairead attend a family wedding. The couple seem to get on well, but they’re never shown speaking to each other because each is in the process of exploring something that will challenge their relationship. Fitting the setting, that challenge is sexual.
Mairead has met an old flame, the man with whom, in her twenties, she had the best sex of her life. Mal is confronting his repressed homosexual desires.
The title? Heaven? Do they both seek a joy that will utterly transcend their merely comfortable relationship? Have both become aware that Eternity fast approaches, with its mysterious, unsatisfying promise of either oblivion or pleasures of a less certain nature?
In contrast to the metaphysical connotations of the title, both characters use very physical metaphors to express their needs and doubts, underlining that they’re far from finished with this plane of existence. She asks is this where my 50 years has lead? He wonders whether he has the courage to enter the world below, the lower dimension.
Because of my peculiar (and un-Australian) penchant for digging into metaphor, I should make clear that the play is not in any way religious (except what it has in common with all serious philosophies: an awareness of the tension between our inner lives and our outward relationships.)
This is, however, modern Ireland, and the hand of Catholicism is still heavy. Mairead tells of going to England for an abortion. Mal’s sexual fantasies are couched in the language of his desire for Jesus, effectively suggesting the complexity of his emotional situation, its guilt and its passion.
As the couple, Lucy Miller and Noel Hodda are absolutely superb.
Miller’s Mairead is gloriously tough. She doesn’t edit her speech. She’s a proud playground bully. She’s utterly disdainful of her daughter’s choice of partner. Reflecting on the death of her abusive father, she hisses that cancer sometimes takes the right ones. She’s deeply sensual and unafraid to fulfill her needs. Yet, she never speaks a word against Mal. It’s a magnificently rounded portrait, strength sparring with uncertainty, delivered with captivating power.
Hodda’s Mal is gentler, softer – desirous of the direction Mairead gives his life. Hodda plays the humour of the-dag-who-dares with consummate skill, but also marvellously portrays the internal battle between desire and doubt.
It’s a temptation with a production like this to be so taken by the skill of the makers that you forget the meaning, that (to mangle Yeats) you fall in love with the dancers, and forget the dance. But this production – an exploration of the tension between our inner and outer worlds, epitomised in its presentation of a marriage under threat – achieves the perfect marriage between artistry and Art.
Paul Gilchrist
Heaven by Eugene O’Brien
Presented by Bitchen Wolf
At the Loading Dock Qtopia, until May 31
Image by Alex Vaughan
Theatre Red 