Days of Heaven

So which would you prefer as a reference point for a play? Chekov’s Three Sisters or Gerry Stembridge’s About Adam? The press release for Very Heaven, the latest production at Dublin’s Focus Theatre, mentions Chekov but the play’s director, Bairbre Ni Chaoimh, name-checks the movie almost as soon as we begin this interview, but only because Very Heaven is about three sisters and also – like About Adam – deals with the tensions that arise when a man arrives on the scene. As written by celebrated Canadian playwright and political polemicist Ann Lambert, the play also deals with underlying themes of language and class. And Bairbre Ni Chaomh clearly is buzzing with excitement at the prospect of directing such a work.

“What I love about this play is that it focuses on the tensions within a family,” she says. “And these are exacerbated by the fact that Sisters couldn’t be more different and they all reassemble in the family home after the death of their mother, to scatter her ashes. But it’s set near Montreal and it’s an Anglophone family so there are class divisions involved, in that this is an upper middle-class family where there has always been money and privilege, and they were raised by a mother who always tried to bring them up right, to marry the right white, anglophone boy and so on. ”
The latter is hardly likely in relation to Lee, played by Maria Teccee, who is a “cow-punching lesbian” in the play!
‘No!” says Ni Chaoimh. “But there are a lot of parallels with how Ireland used to be because Lee, who now lives in Wyoming, was once discovered by her mother kissing a girl at 18 and brought her to a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist told her that while her feelings are normal, she must not act on them! So Catholic values do dominate this family and they still have preoccupations like believing the worst thing you could be is be a homosexual or have a child out of wedlock.”
Very Heaven is set in 1999 and, being about three sisters, it is one of those modern works which gives great roles to women who are 36, 38 and 40. The other two daughters are played by Elizabeth Moynihan and Aisling McLoughlin. The male interloper, “a French handyman”, is played by Patrick Joseph Byrnes.
“In time, you discover he has been involved, and becomes increasingly involved, with each of the people in the family, so there is a touch of the About Adam about it!” says Bairbre. “But what’s really interesting about the play, for me, is that the three daughters do have this image of their mother as a formidable, unyielding, controlling person.
The eldest daughter tried to live by her mother’s rules, married the right man, is wealthy and very unhappy because her husband is having affairs with his students. The other daughter takes to the drink and has relationships with all kinds of unsuitable people and has a son on Ritalin, whilst the third daughter is living as far away from the family home as possible. But they come back and have this image of their mother as a mother. They don’t think of her as a sexual person, particularly because her husband left her in the ’70s. So they discover things about her. For example, after they left she had a whole secret life.”
As such Very Heaven is “full of revelations” that, no doubt, will resonate for any family in a similar situation. And the revelations become all the more, well, revealing, when our three daughters discover diaries their mother wrote in which it is even disclosed what she really thought about them.
“So in a sense, all three daughters have to reappraise their image of their parent and see her in a far more complex way than they previously had” says Bairbre Ni Chaoimh. “And don’t forget to tell hotpress readers that we will have the lovely Maria Teccee singing as much as we can in the play!”