Ordinary people, extraordinary passions

HAUNTED, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

Edna O’Brien has made a career out of writing highly literate books about the “quietly desperate”, the ordinary people whose stories are no less compelling than those of supposedly more interesting characters.

More than 40 years ago she wrote a series of TV plays about such characters, one of which featured couple Jack and Gladys Berry. This Royal Exchange premiere is a deeper examination of those lives.

Set in the Fifties, this is a typical tale of a couple in their fifties, so long together they have grown apart; in love, but far from in lust.

She (Brenda Blethyn), works while he has a small income and does not. She is starved of affection and longs for affirmation that he still loves her. He (Niall Buggy), conversely sublimates his affections towards his garden . . . and a young woman, Hazel (Beth Cooke), who calls about an item of clothing he is selling.

In a succession of meetings he gives the girl more choice items from his “late” wife’s wardrobe, infatuated and keen to gain her affection — though his love is returned only in the daughter-father sense.

So far, so much stating the obvious: but O’Brien’s talent for minutiae and language are what lift this play above the Friday-afternoon-radio level, making it deeper and sadder than kitchen-sink storytelling and elevating things, at times, to poetry.

O’Brien draws humour from Jack’s fixation with the girl, and the way his fibs to cover their meetings build into bigger and bigger lies, his situation getting deeper and deeper and his day of reckoning closer and closer.

The playwright draws a surprising amount of humour from the language of the couple — though it’s fair to say few people probably go around quoting quite so much literature at each other.

The evening is finally made thrilling by the performances of Buggy, Blethyn and Cooke.

The former is on stage throughout, charting emotions through melancholy to excitement and disappointment, while Blethyn is equally strong as the frumpy wife with deep loneliness and mistrust.

Despite the exalted company, Cooke makes this a real three-hander, not a duo with an onlooker. Braham Murray directs strongly, without apparently intruding too much.