Haunted

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

Early in Edna O’Brien’s intriguing new play, given an elegant production by the Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester, a Shakespeare enthusiast and budding horticulturist names a species of rose after his wife. It is sturdy, bears no scent and has remarkable thorns.

This certainly provides Brenda Blethyn with a compelling character note for her redoubtable Mrs Berry, but it also serves as a useful description of the play itself. Simple on the surface, its form gradually reveals itself as something altogether more prickly.

As the aging Mr Jack Berry, Niall Buggy gives an engaging performance as an over-familiar figure: the would-be rake in a bow tie and cardigan. With his nose in Hamletand his mind on a young woman called Hazel (Beth Cooke), the story he tells could be borderline banal.

Blethyn’s Mrs Berry, on the other hand, who we first meet storming into her home with the rumbling gait of a prize fighter, before slapping her varicose veins into submission, elevates the role with a commanding balance between the hectoring and affectionate.

Such is the spirit of the dialogue and the verve of performance that it can take a while to register the cruelty of Mr Berry’s deceit.

Pretending he is a widower, he woos Hazel with a tangle of lies and a stream of gifts purloined from his wife’s wardrobe, while Mrs Berry is unnerved to discover her past – indeed her identity – has been gradually stripped away. There’s a further sharp poignancy: Mrs Berry is the supervisor of a doll factory, and Simon Higglett’s ingenious set would look ghostly enough – its suburban London walls as glowing and translucent as apparitions – without a solitary doll that gazes down on this childless couple from a high shelf, like something now forever out of reach.

The plot may threaten to curdle, but O’Brien keeps her telling fresh, skipping from direct narration to dialogue, conjuring different locations from an otherwise naturalistic space and, most strikingly, giving her characters access to a universe of expression. Mrs Berry may seek to banish Hamlet from her husband’s gloomy reading (“He won’t help”), but her speech is just as likely to touch on Shakespeare or Donne, and each character’s emotional life is rendered potent by association, their desires and aches threaded through with significance.

Between the play’s fluctuating styles and the text’s mistier allusions – the title does remind you to be on your toes – director Braham Murray has much to accommodate here. Rather than nail down the play’s meaning, his production allows O’Brien’s ghostly visitors and literary spirits to mingle in teasing suggestion, while the performances match a play of subtle complexity that is sometimes warm, sometimes unsettling, but always slyly affecting. Until February 13