Brenda Blethyn and Niall Buggy star in Edna O’Brien’s Haunted.

Marriage and the shattering betrayals that can sometimes unexpectedly strengthen them are the theme of Haunted, award winning Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s play now showing at the 59E59 Theaters in New York. CAHIR O’DOHERTY talks to the show’s legendary writer and its stars.
 
In marriage all is perceived though much is withheld, writes Edna O’Brien in her wise and witty play Haunted, now showing at the 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. It’s exactly the kind of hard-won, tell-the-truth observation that her new play is filled with, making for a particularly absorbing night out.

But O’Brien’s own life has been so eventful and fascinating that it’s as though she lived it to become an ideal subject for a biographer herself. She’d probably bristle at the suggestion, but the fact is she often found herself front and center of so many of the social changes that have engulfed Ireland since the late 1950s.

In the 1960s she caused a sensation in Ireland when her debut novel, The Country Girls, dared to present a full and frank depiction of the everyday trials and tribulations of young Irish women. For her pains O’Brien, who hails from Tuamgraney, Co. Clare, was rewarded with a book burning led by her local parish priest, with enthusiastic help from the rural community she grew up in, which rejected her soundly.

Soon after O’Brien moved to London, where she has lived on and off ever since. And although she has long since put the experience of those early days behind her, she must have been marked by the philistine pieties of that hypocritical era.

This month O’Brien returns to the New York stage to present a work that’s unlike just about every other novel or play she has written. For a start, Haunted is set in England and it features exclusively English characters -- something of a first for this award-winning writer.

The pay-off for the creative risk O’Brien takes in stepping outside of her usual Irish boundaries is that she’s written what may well be her most accessible play ever.

The play opens with Mr. Berry (Irish actor Niall Buggy) remembering his late wife and all of the secrets that the pair kept from each other throughout their long and mostly very happy marriage: “Never knew her age, never knew if she was younger or older than me, hid her passport, never clapped eyes on it,” he says with laughter and admiration.

And when Mrs. Berry finally arrives onstage, played with all-electric intensity by the mesmerizing Oscar nominated British actress Brenda Blethyn, we instantly understand why she has fascinated him all his life.

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Nster.com