COMING TO the Town Hall Theatre next week is Landmark Production’s staging of Deirdre Kinahan’s acclaimed new play, These Halcyon Days, nominated for Best New Play in the 2012 Irish Times Theatre Awards.
Set in a nursing home, the play centres on the unforeseen relationship that grows between residents Sean and Patricia. When the play opens Seán is sitting alone abandoned to his memories, when in storms Patricia, a feisty woman with a zest for life and handsome men in wheelchairs.
A wary intimacy soon develops between the two – a relationship by turns charming and combative, tender and funny. The play is infused with Deirdre Kinahan’s hallmark wry humour and humanity and is a glorious celebration of the human spirit against the odds.
As The Evening Herald wrote: “Tender and dark, These Halcyon Days tickles the funnybone as much as it pulls at the heartstrings…the performances are stellar, and Kinahan’s message is an important one.”
Kinahan describes the play’s origin.
“It came from a moment when I went into nursing home to visit my own Uncle Sean,” she tells me. “He was a lovely man, a poet and a historian and had travelled a lot and was always gregarious.
“He was suffering from dementia but it was affecting him slowly. One day I went in with my daughter who had brought him a flower and he took the flower and started talking to it and listening to it as if it were telling him a story, and he engaged with her and looking at him then I thought ‘He’s the same man inside, all that intellect and character is still in there’, even though he was fading away.
“So the inspiration for the play was that notion of somebody who appears to be in one place but when you dig deeper you find a whole other person and you realise the essence of the human being is always there.”
Sean in the play is a very different character Kinahan reveals.
“He is a very different man to my uncle,” she says. “He’s had a different life. He was an actor and is a gay man of 74 who has had this fulfilling long term relationship with a younger man called Tom who has now abandoned him.
“I wanted to look at someone who had kind of missed the beat. They were living in Ireland when homosexuality was all undercover and then in the 1990s things started to open up but Sean was of an age where he couldn’t embrace it, whereas Tom did and he says in the play ‘The world turned just a tad and I missed it somehow’.”
The play celebrates the vitality of the older generation.
“It’s all about a generation who are still with us and very much a part of our world but sometimes feel as if they have been thrown on the scrapheap,” Kinahan notes. “But they are from an extraordinary generation who saw us through tough times into a very different place. Patricia is one of those women who knew Ireland in hard times but has fight and feistiness in her. They have a whole history and energy to them and there is a lot to be thankful for with them.”
She enlarges upon the relationship that develops between Sean and Patricia.
“You could describe the play as something of a love story,” she says. “It’s a very profound relationship they have at the end of their days and neither of them were expecting. When they first meet, Sean has given up on life and has decided to let himself lapse because he is so hurt at being abandoned by his lover. Patricia on the other hand has always been the woman in control, the leading light in her family. But all that empowerment has been taken from her because she has a physical disability which means she can no longer live on her own.
“She is fighting that prognosis whereas Sean is using his ailment as an excuse to escape life. But when they meet they just seem to galvanise each other. Patricia wakes Sean up and pulls him up back out of himself and makes him engage, even if it is only fleetingly, back in the possible joy of life. And she also loosens up and flowers in her enjoyment of him so it is a very profound relationship. Through it they can face their fears and make their own decisions about how to move on.
“Sean ultimately helps Patricia escape and leave. In doing that he is committing himself back to being alone but he feels he has achieved something by helping her get back to her life. Even though the truth of it is she is going to die, so the play is dark in that respect, it’s had a galvanising effect on the now and says if there is a heartbeat and blood coursing through your veins you’re alive and you mean something.”
In Anita Reeves and Stephen Brennan, Kinahan’s play is blessed with two outstanding actors.
“I knew I needed two great actors for the play, it’s just the two of them onstage for 70 minutes,” she states. “Stephen and Anita both signed on very early so they were in my head as I was writing the final drafts of the script and they are absolutely magnificent together.
“This is a play for everyone, it’s you and your family reflected onstage. One young guy in New York who saw it came backstage after it and said to us that it was like Cocoon meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest!”
These Halcyon Days runs from Tuesday June 25 to Saturday 29 at 8pm with a matinee performance at 3pm on the Saturday. Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
