Eugene O’Brien: Heaven, Pure Mule, and life in the midlands
Andrew Bennett and Janet Moran in Heaven, by Eugene O'Brien. Picture: Leo Byrne
Twenty years ago, Eugene O’Brien brought his acclaimed play Eden to London’s West End. However, while it was embraced by Irish audiences and garlanded with awards here, the Pure Mule creator's two-hander about marital strife in the Midlands did not get quite the same reception in London.
“The English didn't quite go for it," admits O'Brien. "There was all this kind of Adam and Eve imagery and Biblical stuff on the poster and I think people went in thinking they were going to get something else. Instead, they got these two people from Offaly that they couldn't really understand.”
Hence the delight, and relief, that the Offaly writer’s latest play, Heaven, staged by Fishamble, has been playing to full and appreciative houses, since it premiered recently at the Dublin Theatre Festival. It tours to the Everyman in Cork next week.
O’Brien is refreshingly honest, acknowledging the misfires that have made him a better writer. One of these was the play which followed on from Eden — Savoy, which had a run in the Peacock Theatre in Dublin in 2004.
“It’s a play I didn't really crack. It was about my own experiences in cinema, kind of Cinema Paradiso Edenderry-style but I didn't really understand what it was about so the play didn’t work, it wasn't very good. But failure teaches you a lot, so it was good for me as a writer.”
O’Brien believes he has cracked it with Heaven, about a middle-aged married couple facing a reckoning at a family wedding in the Midlands.
“Well, I know what it's about, so that’s helpful,” he laughs. “It kind of came out of me like Eden just kind of came out of me. It just seemed to land during Covid at the kitchen table. I think it's influenced by the stuff that had happened in my life.”
Eden demonstrated O’Brien’s skill in depicting a relationship turning toxic but in Heaven, the couple are at a different stage in life — they have the bedrock of a good relationship but all is not quite right.
“In the case of the Eden couple, they were completely cut off from each other. Whereas this couple, they’re older and they're great friends, they talk a lot, and they’re really warm to each other but they each have a huge part of themselves that they haven't revealed to one another.” O’Brien says he also relished the dramatic possibilities of setting the play at a wedding.
“All the action takes place at the great Irish wedding, which is a brilliant thing to write about, because an audience knows exactly the beats of it — the mass, the speeches, the dancing, and the fight or whatever.”
In Heaven, O’Brien is once again on his familiar home territory of the Midlands, where he set his series 2005 Pure Mule, still considered by many to be one of the best home-produced drama series aired on Irish television. It was broadcast again during the pandemic, providing a walk down memory lane for people who loved it first time around and a hit of quality drama for a new audience. O’Brien was delighted with the response.
“It was very gratifying, especially younger people watching it. It also looked very well, it stood up because we shot it on a new digital camera at the time which was very state-of-the-art. The performances, of course, are great.”
O’Brien believes that audiences were also looking for something different from an unrelenting stream of gritty and sensational content.
“I think people were looking for a bit of drama that was about ordinary people, and not killing people with baseball bats and burying girls bodies in the woods. It's actually very hard to get commissioners interested in anything if there isn’t a murder or gangland stuff or serial killers or whatever. So I think there was a bit of a hunger for that — Normal People showed that which was great.”
O’Brien has been mining a creative streak of late — as well as Heaven, he has been working on TV and film projects, and also published a book, Going Back, which revisits one of the protagonists of Pure Mule, the lovable rogue Scobie, who returns from Australia to a very different Ireland.
O’Brien already has a TV adaptation mapped out in his head and says another instalment from the Pure Mule universe is a possibility. “There is tons of story in the book. Myself and Declan Recks, the director, are talking about it, trying to plot how we'd approach it. The six episodes, I know exactly what they would be. And there's new characters as well and all that. Pure Mule is remembered so fondly, it’s great.”
- Heaven is at the Everyman, Cork, Tue, Oct 25 and Wed, Oct 26, everymancork.com; Theatre Royal, Waterford, Sat, Oct 29; Belltable, Limerick, Fri, Nov 4 and Sat, Nov 5
