I first became aware of the playwright Teresa Deevy, the Irish author of the Jermyn Street's imminent A Wife to James Whelan, while leafing through a production history of the Abbey Theatre through 1951 and finding her name six times between 1930 and 1936. She was among a handful of women writers who had multiple plays produced at Ireland's National Theatre.
Born in 1894 in Waterford, Deevy lost her hearing at the age of 19, a result of Meniere’s disease, which ran in her family. She joined a deaf sister in London to learn how to lip-read and was captivated by the theatre, where she would practice lip-reading at performances with a script in her lap. She decided to become a playwright.
Reading her work, I noted Deevy's inspired imagination and voice, and vividly remember reading Deevy’s best-known play, Katie Roche, which has been revived multiple times by the Abbey. I sat up when the title character of that play, a teenaged serving girl, says, “I long ago made up my mind I’d be a saint”. So many of Deevy's characters are tormented by ambition.
But what struck me more than anything was Deevy’s uncanny ability to write her characters’ complexity - their uncertainty, indecision and contradiction. These are the qualities that inspired some to call her the "Irish Chekhov". The challenge of navigating the psychological density of writing like this has been a fascination to me since I first encountered it in the plays of Arthur Schnitzler in 2003 - the man Freud considered his literary doppelgänger, because Schnitzler intuitively understood the truths of the unconscious.
I directed two of Schnitzler’s plays for my Off Broadway theatre, the Mint, and met Arthur’s grandson, Peter. On the first day of London rehearsals for Wife to James Whelan, I shared the story Peter told me about the chief lesson he learned from his grandfather, passed down by his father and applicable to everything: “It’s not as simple as that.”
Deevy operates within that same rocky terrain, which makes a fascinating and compelling challenge for her casts. Actors are often taught to “play an action”, to persuade, to provoke, etc. But Deevy’s characters don’t know what they want or why they act. The actor’s task in her work is to be present, listening and alive to changing, uncontrollable emotions. The rehearsal process is training for a high-wire act. (Fiach Kunz in the title role, pictured above)
There’s another remarkable thing about Deevy’s writing. As a deaf playwright, Deevy perfected the play in her own mind. Writers today often describe needing to hear the play aloud, but Deevy relied on herself. She may have received feedback, but ultimately, she relied on her inner ear and how the dialogue sounded in her imagination. We have worked diligently to honour her intentions, not just her words, by working through the difference between the script’s 32 pauses, 35 silences, and one dead silence.
Wife to James Whelan is the play the Abbey didn’t want, its 1942 rejection ending any further affiliation during Deevy's lifetime with that vaunted address. (A splinter company formed by unhappy actors awarded the play a £50 prize and promised a production that never happened.)
It was finally produced in 1956, at a small basement theatre in Dublin, probably ten years after she finished it. Sometime after that production, the play went missing and no one could even read it. Finally, about 40 years later, a typescript was found in the Deevy family home, presumably tucked away inadvertently where no one thought to look. We staged the play at the Mint Theater in New York in 2010 and are returning to it now in London: Deevy's work needs to be produced and not only read. I know that’s not easy, but it is essential.
I’ve long been aware of the power Wife to James Whelan has over audiences, but I recently learned something about why this play is so gripping. Helen Shaw, the New York Times chief theatre critic, recently recorded a podcast where she says that live theatre, unlike any other art form, can give audiences the visceral feeling of regret: “You are watching it unfold in front of you, and you can’t stop the play from happening. You can’t get up out of your seat, you can’t put the book down on the coffee table…” This play, like life, is unstoppable. And you regret with the characters in its tale of the title character, who wins a sought-after job in Dublin leaving behind his girl and their friends. He returns home seven years later to his small town to fulfil his promise of starting a business and providing employment.
And that’s how Wife to James Whelan works: you watch characters do things, and you want to stop them - but you can’t - and then you hope that they will fix it, that they will figure something out, that they will change. Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t, but along the way you live it with them.
- Wife to James Whelan runs 25 June to 25 July at Jermyn Street Theatre.
- More theatre reviews on theartsdesk
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