Written by Eugene O’Brien

Directed by Jim Culleton

Regret has reared its face at the Festival more than many other concepts this year. How lives may splinter and alter with the decisions we make, or in Heaven’s case, how lives may have played out had we acted on differing impulses and desires. 

There isn’t a moment which goes by in which someone, somewhere, isn’t considering what would have happened had they given in, had they said ‘yes’, and hadn’t played it a touch safer.

Sentimentally bitter, Eugene O’Brien’s Heaven reinvigorates the poison of nostalgia in a cruelly humorous manner with a series of alternating monologues, gradually building a fuller picture of the lives Mairead and Mal, and the ones they never got the chance to. And it all sparks where the drama comes to dine: a wedding. Set in the Irish midlands of Edenderry, this fifty-something couple find more than gins and bouquets at this affair as they reconnect to past romances and long-repressed passions. 

A two-hander, Janet Moran kicks things off as Mairead, a woman who expresses the soulless nature of life with her honesty, her bravado, and a healthy dollop of wit. Just listening to her descriptive nature of the ravaged shopping areas, the lack of prosperity, even hope, tells everything we need to know without lengthy exposition – it’s a quick instruction to the success Fishamble have on their hands.

While Andrew Bennet’s Mal, usually long asleep by this point, cannot shirk the face of religious intensity and his long-repressed urges, manifesting in a rather attractive man, with a passing resemblance to Christ almighty. Though more subdued, playing a teacher who seeks the pacifist approach, it builds to a much-required crescendo, an explosive kettle of all these decades of repression come to fruition.

Completely benign, Zia Bergin-Holly’s set design is straight from the street corner – practical, effective, and clean. It isn’t attempting to encroach and does little more than add a sense of realism and place, though is strikingly effective. It’s a liminal space, a safe and all-too-familiar one in which Moran and Bennett can confess to themselves (or rather, to us, their intimates) the things they cannot to one another. The only shift is the lighting, which serves both narrative and storytelling purposes, gradually chasing away the darkness as the pair speak long into the night and morning, but reflects more than a simple breaking of day, but a rising run on the pair’s new lives away from the insecurities they have carried.

In the subdued direction of Jim Culleton, the conversational exchanges pick up as the other fades, the cadence and rhythm maintained throughout the runtime – a lengthier ninety minutes made to feel complete and rounded.

Everything here is of the earth, honest, just not with one another. A holy trinity of gorgeous writing, frank performance, and canny direction: Heaven is the most authentic and human production at this year’s festival.