A Haunting Off Broadway

By Gwen Orel

Edna O'Brien's play Haunted makes its U.S. premiere on Wednesday as part of Brits Off Broadway at 59E59.

But O'Brien is Irish, not British. The Clare playwright/novelist (The Country Girls) laughs. "I had to be a bit of a turncoat!"

Twice Academy-Award nominated Actress Brenda Blethyn, who is in fact English, laughs and offers "I'm wearing a green cardigan."

O'Brien has lived in England for 50 years, but nearly everything she writes is set in Ireland, and only now is she beginning to write characters that aren't Irish. "I've never set a novel in England," she says. Yet Irishness informs all of her writing, "what makes a work interesting is how intricate it is. Whether it's Irish or Swedish is irrelevant, unless it touches on the salient emotions of people."

The play tells the story of the Berrys - an older couple who live in England (the husband is Anglo-Irish) and their interactions with Hazel.

When Hazel comes to the door looking for used clothes Mr. Berry is so taken with her he begins a program of trading elocution lessons with her for castoffs of his dead wife.

The trouble is, the wife is still alive and wondering why all her clothes are disappearing.

It's a play rife with insights and nuances about relationships - and also full of suspense.

There are ghosts, mostly metaphorical, throughout the play - even the names of the characters.

Back in the 60s, O'Brien wrote a television play about a couple called the Berrys. Fifty years later, after seeing Blethyn appear in 'Night, Mother in NYC', she went back to the characters and wrote The Haunted.

"She is unique. Because Brenda excels at comedy, her timing is just eerie. She also understands and delves deep into sorrow, or what is usually called tragedy. The part requires it. To have an actress who can straddle those two vital emotions and sensibilities is very rare."

Blethyn laughs. "Here's your money!" she says to O'Brien. The two women have a lovely rapport - Blethyn cheeky and pert, O'Brien articulate and more serious; each ribbing off each other.

Blethyn didn't know O'Brien before that night in NYC, though she'd heard of her. It took a few years for O'Brien to get the script ready to send her, but as soon as Blethyn read it she was taken with "a feast of language.

In an age where we're reduced to texting and abbreviating, to emails, to suddenly open these pages and find this feast of languages was a wonderful surprise.

There used to be an advert in England for lager, "Danish lager, this lager will reach the part other beers cannot reach. Edna does that, touches the psyche and the emotions much deeper than other things I'd read."

Niall Buggy (Translations on Broadway; recently Enda Walsh's Penelope at St. Ann's Warehouse) says, "I think Edna is one of the greatest writers of love in our time. As all great drama does, the play deals with loss. It's our greatest dilemma in life. If you love in life you invariably, inevitably lose, because everything dies."

The character he plays is Irish, which gives him that "sense of exile outside of one's home. That doesn't necessarily mean that one wants to go back there. I'm an Irish actor living in London, and have done for many years, but I still say I'm going home to Dublin and back to London."

His performance in Penelope as a Homer-reading suitor who gives the first speech about love that touches Penelope's heart was unforgettable (see my review in this paper November 9).

He admits that lately his characters have been consumed with love. "But in Penelope, that character speaks about love and then immediately forgets it. Mr. Berry is in love with love. He loves people, and he loves being in love. He's also in love with youth - we don't choose to fall in love. People seem to think it is a choise. It isn't always a choice. And you can love more than one person at a time I'm afraid."

He tells me Mr. Berry absolutely loves his wife. But "this young girl brings back a childlike quality into his own life."

Blethyn says, "It's about relationships, and people who have been together for a long time, the trust and suspicions that maybe one keeps to oneselves. Do you poke a dog that's going to bite you or do you go into the other room and leave it alone? It's about the things you lose in a long relationship..."

"And the things you keep, the ambiguities," O'Brien interjects. "These two people love each other, but at the same time Mr. Berry's a bit of a wanderluster. It's that tighrope balance between love, suspense and withheld love."

She deliberately created Mr. Berry as Anglo-Irish, Hazel the waif of Irish extraction, and Mrs. Berry, English for "that clash of temperament and clash of language."

"Mr. Berry," Buggy explains, "reads Shakespeare all the time." He has that imagination that still exists so strongly within the Irish.

"Hopefully it might help us to survive this horrific situation we are in now as a country."

There's some debate among theatergoers who is actually alive and dead on stage. O'Brien and Blethyn aren't telling. Buggy says, "I can't answer that."

But audiences in Manchester, where the play began, and on tour have found themselves haunted by the play. "This play provokes the most post-show discussion of all the plays I've ever done," says O'Brien.

Catch it soon; it's here only until January 2nd.