It is a game we all play. How might our lives have turned out if we had made different choices? What if we had acted on impulse? Trusted our emotions instead of running scared? Would things have worked out if we had stayed with that first lover instead of settling for the partner we did?
There can be no answers for there are too many variables, but in those moments of existential questioning it is hard to resist the fantasy of a parallel life. This is the territory of Eugene O’Brien’s Heaven, set on the weekend of a spirited wedding in Edenderry in the Irish midlands when, unbeknown to each other, a fiftysomething couple find themselves reckoning with a romanticised past and an uninspiring present.
On the one hand, we have Janet Moran’s Mairead, a social worker with a fiery temperament, who runs into the man who stole her heart at the age of 20. On the other, Andrew Bennett’s Mal, a teacher with a pathological need to keep the peace, who faces up to a repressed passion of literally religious intensity. Both of them worry they have led lives of less than full intensity, the sensible decisions of adulthood forcing them, they fear, to deny their true selves.
Funny, bittersweet and exquisitely written, Heaven takes the form pioneered by Brian Friel and championed by writers such as Mark O’Rowe in which alternating monologues give us an ever fuller picture. What Mairead says about Mal is enriched, confirmed or contradicted by what he says about her, while the cast of characters builds up around them in vivid detail.
In Jim Culleton’s unshowy, emotionally true production for Fishamble, Moran and Bennett make compelling storytellers. Both are rooted, conversational and expertly tuned into the rhythms of O’Brien’s script. They can be funny and spiky, revelling in their own middle-aged stubbornness, but also, in this intimate format, willing to share their secret insecurities. The more we become their confidants, the more designer Zia Bergin-Holly raises the lights on a set that seems at once indoors and out, pub, street and hotel, allowing the actors to step forward and pull us into their turbulent emotional world. It is consummately done.