Secrets and lies laid bare in this tender two-hander

The Age

18-05-2025

THEATRE
HEAVEN
Qtopia Sydney, The Loading Dock, May 16
Until May 31
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½
'The one that got away' – I've never really liked that phrase. A bit too Wolf Creek -coded. But in Eugene O'Brien's Heaven, a story that is both tender and aflame, the one that got away is reframed as the life one could have been lived; that secret one, in which our deepest fantasies, all those trapped and trammelled desires, keep our minds a quiet prisoner through the years. Even as age performs its brittling rituals on the body; even as the point of no return in our relationships seems long past.
Desire, regret, ageing – the responsibilities we have to ourselves and those we love: these themes are braided in a series of monologues by two wonderful leads, Lucy Miller as the vixen firebrand Mairead and Noel Hodda as the sweetly square, repressed Mal.
Mairead and Mal's marriage was passionless from the beginning, but they've been friends for 20 years. It takes a visit home to a crumbling Irish town for a wedding for them to reckon with what their younger selves could not.
Without any character interaction in this two-hander, and with just a long wooden bench and a shimmering black curtain comprising Caity Cowan's Qtopia set, the strength of Heaven rests heavily upon the performance of its two leads and Kate Gaul's compassion-driven direction. Having proven their chops many times over, it's no surprise the actors carry their roles beautifully, with only a few patches of rushed pacing to find fault with.
Miller, founder of production company Bitchen Wolf, with which this show debuts, is a divine stage presence. Vivacious, unabashed and arch, she eats the cream of her lines and licks her fingers afterwards.
Even with her character's vices and frailties on display – her warring relationship with her daughter, her fast submission to her body's carnal drives – you find yourself always in her corner. It may be Mairead's temptation in this town is 'just' an old flame. But in Heaven, the all-consuming power of desire is neither underestimated nor shamed.
Greater pity though goes to poor Mal, with the troubled ticker and 50 years of repressed homosexuality, which has followed him all his life as an intense eroticisation of Christ. It's a devastating irony, if often played to comic effect: that the icon of a religion that would cast him out returns to him again and again as an erection-causing, gentle-hearted saviour, a paradoxical figure of solace and torment.
Hodda is completely endearing in his performance, especially when Mal descends – with the help of a little nose candy – into the 'underneath' realm of his repressed identity. His piping ejaculations of 'Jeysus!' in his County Limerick accent is a triumph for Carmen Lysiak's dialect coaching.