A haunting combination for Brenda
BY any standards it’s an impressive combination – a brand-new play written by the great Irish novelist Edna O’Brien specifically for the multi-award winning actress Brenda Blethyn.
But that’s the background to Haunted, having its world premiere at the Royal Exchange in a few days.
Directed by Braham Murray, it also stars Irish actor Niall Buggy and the rising young star Beth Cooke, recently seen at the Exchange in The Children’s Hour and Three Sisters.
When a captivating young woman, played by Cooke, enters the life of the quixotic Mr Berry (Niall Buggy, a familiar face from the likes of Father Ted and the Mamma Mia! filmand the West End production of Guys And Dolls), his desperation to ensure her return causes him to start secretly giving away his wife’s clothes in exchange for elocution lessons.
But as the redoubtable Mrs Berry (Brenda Blethyn) searches for an explanation to her fast-diminishing wardrobe, he soon finds that both his relationships are increasingly under threat.
Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist Philip Roth has hailed Edna O’Brien as ‘the most gifted woman now writing in English’.
So how exactly did she end up writing a play for Brenda?
“I met Edna in New York when I was doing Marsha Noman’s play Night Mother on Broadway, three or four years ago,” says Brenda.
“She said, in this lilting Irish voice of hers, ‘Oh Brenda, I’d love you to do this play I’m writing’. Then she sent me the play but, and I know this sounds awful, I just didn’t have time to read it.
"Then I met her again, and she said ‘Oh, I’m dying of anticipation’, obviously just to chivvy me along, so I felt I had to read it.
“And I loved it. I thought it was a beautifully written piece. Then when Edna said she didn’t know whether it was going to go on anywhere I said I’d send it to Braham Murray.
"The same thing happened again – Braham had all this pile of stuff to do and, of course, he kept pretending he was about to read it. But eventually he did, just to shut me up, and rang me straight away to say how much he loved it.
“So Edna came to see The Glass Menagerie in Richmond when it was on tour, then had a meeting with Braham.
"It was such a novelty," she told me afterwards, "to meet someone with manners in this worlds of barbarians!"
Done deal
"So there it was. Niall was a done deal and then we met Beth. Now here we all are, and a more enjoyable job could not be had.”
Niall, he tells me, had also heard about the play three or four years ago – 'actually Edna told me she wrote it with you in mind', Brenda teases – and thought it 'a fascinating piece of work'.
Great living novelists
“It’s a very particular piece and very original in its use of theatre. It’s exciting that it’s written by not only a woman but by one of the great living novelists of our time.
"She has, I think, written some wonderful plays but they haven’t always worked particularly well. We’re the test pilots with this and if the fun we’re having in rehearsals comes over on stage, then I think it’ll be a huge success.”
After starring in Three Sisters, Beth went to Ireland to appear in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing at the Gate in Dublin, although she already knew back in January that she was going to be back at the Exchange for this – something of a rarity for actors, especially in these straitened times, as her more experienced co-actors ruefully agree.
O’Brien herself attended the first few days of rehearsals and, as Brenda knows, it can sometimes be a bit of a mixed blessing to have the writer on hand.
“She was lovely and very kind – she’s got a heart as big as this room,” Brenda reports.
“But you can sometimes find yourself going down a bit of a blind alley. I’d thought my character was Irish, for instance, and had already gone down that road a bit when Edna told me, ‘oh no, she’s English!’.
"So I had to get that out of my head and it’s quite hard to unlearn something like that.
“Mind you, it’s not as bad as a David Mamet play I was in once with Nigel Hawthorne. It was for the BBC Television and Nigel’s character talked non-stop throughout it, for about an hour and a half.
"One day David Mamet came to our technical run-through – so this was very late on in the process – and was absolutely ashen at the end of it. ‘You’ve got the wrong script,’ he said to Nigel. ‘I’ve completely rewritten this character!’ Poor old Nigel had to unlearn all the work he’d done and relearn a David Mamet, of all people, part overnight.
“So I’ve got nothing to complain about.”
Haunted is previewing at the Royal Exchange from Wednesday, May 13 and runs until June 13. Call 0161 833 9833 for tickets.
Published: Thu, 07 May, 2009
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