Haunted
Brenda Blethyn

A strong cast give flawless performances in this three hander set in an outer London suburb in the not-too-distant past. The set was striking with its green cylindrical backing from floor to flies which doubled as the walls of the rather bare living-room occupied by Mr and Mrs Berry. It also enabled us to see at times characters approaching the door and at other times a succession of rosebuds coming to full flower and mutating to cell structures viewed through a microscope. Whether these were cancer cells, as one critic thought, was not immediately clear. Niall Buggy gave a rich performance as the sixty-something widower who lived in a world of make-believe. From his opening speech he commanded the stage with charm, grandiloquence and a sense of what might have been in his life had he not taken up with a barmaid in Kent. Vocally powerful, he caressed Edna O’Brien’s florid phrasing and vividly brought out Jack’s frustrations in a succession of unsatisfying jobs together with the sense of exile from his native country and his ancestral home. The brief brightness of a apparently chaste and doomed relationship with a girl almost too young to be his daughter is a highlight of the second half of the play. In striped blazer and straw hat he enjoys walking out with Hazel on the beach followed by tea in a Kentish seaside café. Jack Quincy Berry has sold his father’s gold watch to pay for his dreams. Brenda Blethyn, for whom the play had been written, was powerfully present too though she was alive only in the memory of her husband. This was not the harridan of the movie ‘Little Voice’ nor of Mike Leigh’s film; here there was tenderness in the recollections of a visit to the decaying Berry home in Ireland and of the early years of marriage with her coy references to ‘Shangri-la‘. Some of the language placed in her mouth was rather literary and ‘poetical’ but, whether berating her husband for his failings or recalling early memories and regretting the later lack of intimacy between them, she was very good indeed. “Why don’t Solomon and Sheba go dancing any more?” she plaintively asks her husband. Beth Cooke was perfectly cast as the waif-like Hazel who visits the Berry home while Mrs Berry is at work; she has been told that there might be some period model clothes available at this address and Jack invites her in, producing one of his wife’s Balenciaga garments for the visitor who chats easily about her background and tells how she has a client at the Dorchester to whom she gives elocution lessons. Niall immediately books her to help him in the same way although it is patently clear that as a skilled and knowledgeable reader of poetry he has no need of her services in this respect. What he does need of course is companionship in the long hours while his wife is out at work and this Hazel provides on her weekly visit. There is something of an other-worldly quality about Beth Cook’s performance which enables her to carry off the unexpected final visit when it becomes clear that she is actually in a mental institution and is allowed out from time to time under supervision. Her vulnerability feeds Jack’s vanity and his boredom, allowing both characters to grow in the audience’s perception as the play unfolds. Gladys Berry is not above a little subterfuge herself as she realises that her wardrobe is mysteriously diminishing and her husband has a new spring in his step. Announcing that she and a friend are going for a brief holiday abroad she returns to find her husband and Hazel spending the evening together. Hazel is wearing Mrs Berry’s wedding dress and the room is candle-lit when Mrs Berry bursts in. The climax is brutal and Hazel leaves the house in tears at the names she is called and Gladys’s misunderstanding of her visits to Jack. She has always seemed vulnerable if not actually disturbed, and this scene destroys Jack’s fantasy relationship with her. A kind of reconciliation is established between the Berrys only for us to learn that Gladys has developed cancer and dies. The sadness of their relationship is underlined by Jack telling us that he has named a rose in her honour, beautiful but with vicious thorns while we are told that Gladys has turned her face to the wall and does not speak to him. Momentarily the mood is relieved by the last visit of Hazel, seemingly confident and happy, calling to ask what Jack would like for his birthday as she has been given time out to buy something, by the institution she now lives in and her mysterious and unseen chauffeur. The play’s language has a touch of grandiloquence about it; the cadences of Mrs Berry’s speeches have a literary quality that sits ill on the tongue of a former barmaid, even one who has been married to ‘a great talker’ and scion of a faded Anglo-Irish family such as her husband. But the pathos of a relationship which, if not quite broken, has disappointed both of them, as well as the brief flicker of Jack’s splash with Hazel are well realised and a reminder of Edna O’Brien’s great skill as a writer. Yet one feels that the ending was rushed; in spite of the putative cancer cells on the backdrop, the death of Gladys and her refusal to speak to Jack could have been more developed and the fate of Hazel was altogether too sketchy. ‘Interesting’ and ‘certainly worth seeing’ seem dull and lukewarm praise for this play for there was much to enjoy in the writing and especially in the performances which were always commanding, true, and rewarding.

David Farrell, Hereford