Heaven
Writer: Eugene O’Brien
Director: Kate Gaul
The Loading Dock
May 17-31, 2025
A very clever and engrossing play, Eugene O’Brien’s award-winning Heaven reveals the quiet desperation that underlies the marriage of middle-aged Irish couple Mairead and Mal. As Mairead cries “Surely these fifty years must lead to something?’’ the answering response in the audience is palpable. Surely. While heart-wrenchingly sad, at the same time Heaven is outrageously and irreverently funny.
An unadorned two hander, progressively revealing the extent of each spouse’s longing for a more fulfilling, impassioned life through alternating monologues, the play is completely reliant upon its two actors, Lucy Miller as Mairead, and Noel Hodda as Mal, for its impact.
Both do complete justice to their roles, Mairead as the former tearaway for whom marriage was an escape into calmer waters and Mal who married to quiet his homoerotic fantasies.
While they value each other, Mal finding strength in Mairead and Mairead finding friendship in Mal, when attending a lively weekend wedding celebration in their hometown, they both are confronted by other possible – and more intense – directions their lives might have taken had their choices been different. Mairead’s encounter with a former lover reawakens her passion for him and Mal is inspired to imagine a different life had he had the courage to follow his initial religiously inspired urges.
There is an observable difference in the way the husband and wife are characterised by the playwright as Mal who generates most of the laugh-out-loud moments – and Hodda is hilariously ingenuous – is a less developed study. Mairead, however, is a more complex, self- aware character and Miller, striking in a red dress, conveys through gesture, stance and tigerish walk a sense of frustrated, pent-up energy. ‘Who am I?’ she questions, and even sitting quietly, she vibrates. At times, however, her enunciation is difficult to understand.
Both Mairead and Mal pepper their confidences to the audience with comments about the wedding guests and the events of the evening – Mairead’s often biting and Mal’s more impressionable – so that the bare stage seems fully and often drunkenly peopled. No words can describe O’Brien’s mastery of language – rich and raw, raunchy and poignant – and the audience is caught up in the magic of it.
The director, Kate Gaul, wisely chose a very simple staging with basic lighting changes, as while the action is placed in the Irish midlands, its location is in the inner and hidden life.
