A desk, a typewriter, a side table for the bottles. Two chairs, one for Howard Moss (Ian Gledhill), the quiet, self-effacing poetry editor of The New Yorker, the other for Maeve Brennan (Carly Ann Clarke), its clever, beautiful, glamorous social diarist, reviewer, essayist and, later, short story contributor.
Clara Nel Haddon’s Maeve and Howard chronicles the long friendship between these two unlikely characters, which begins in 1950 when a young Howard arrives at the offices of The New Yorker. He is the grandson of Lithuanian Jews who fled their homeland in the First World War, she the daughter of Irish freedom fighters who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising. Maeve’s father Bob was for a while frequently on the run; he was still in prison in 1917 when Maeve was born.
Maeve had originally come to North America when her father embraced respectability and became the Irish Free State’s first minister to the US, moving his young family with him to Washington. While her two sisters had married, Maeve had moved to New York City to pursue her own career, first at Harpers Bazaar and then at The New Yorker itself.
Clarke personifies Maeve, her red hair chicly styled, her red lipstick always in place, her red Pappagallo heels shining. Maeve and Howard emphasises the two most important aspects of her character; she always felt Irish,
‘I have one foot on the sidewalk and the other in boggy old Ireland’
and she had been profoundly affected by the events of her childhood, in particular the night soldiers had ransacked her family home in Belgrave Road, Dublin looking for Bob. She returns to the events of that night again and again as her mind unravels. As she mutters fragments of its memory, Clarke sensitively conveys Maeve’s increasing fragility, her loosening grip on reality.
Heritage and home dominate the thoughts of Maeve and Howard throughout the play, during which we witness the entrancing, capricious Maeve descending into mental illness and alcoholism. Before that, both characters enjoy some success in their work; in 1972 Howard shares the National Poetry Prize with Frank O’Hara (who, as Howard ruefully points out, is already dead), while Maeve persuades their editor to publish some of the short stories that would make her (largely posthumously) famous.
Meanwhile neither do so well in their private lives. Maeve, who’s already been betrayed by the love of her life, makes a marriage that just about everyone (possibly including the bride herself) knows is a colossal mistake. Howard, a closeted gay man whose unsatisfactory relationship falls apart, ventures for the first time, at the age of 50+, to the leather bars of Greenwich Village.
But unlike Maeve, Howard is practical. He’s worried about her drinking, and her spendthrift ways. She is always in debt (‘the big ugly bills’ described by her favourite Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith are a constant problem.) When she’s found wandering out on the street, drunk and handing banknotes to passers-by, it’s Howard who takes her to the emergency room. There’s a moving description of the people they find there; Maeve always focused on the telling detail in her stories. She’s so traumatised by her problems, however, that here Howard has to speak to the staff on her behalf,
‘Her words were all used up.’
In this history of two writers, language inevitably assumes particular importance. Words that Clarke speaks here are sometimes quotes from Maeve’s exquisite writing. She reads snatches of her work aloud to Howard; he in turn speaks poetically of scenes they have shared. At the beach house, the crickets in the dunes are,
‘the orchestra that lures the stars down’
Maeve is soon homeless and sleeping in the ladies’ room at the office, where she throws imaginary parties. Recalling over and again her childhood, her parents. and that night in Belgrave Road, her mind is increasingly confused. The memory of the pure white gloves of her first communion are jumbled up with slogans of Irish independence like tombola tickets in a drum.
The show is interspersed with songs, during which Maeve and Howard dance slow dances, their physical closeness echoing their deep emotional connection. As Maeve’s life descends into chaos, and Howard bales her out again and again, she sings lines from the Irish rebel song Down by the Glenside; at one point Howard joins her with his own childhood memory, a Yiddish song sung by his grandparents.
While Maeve longs for the Ireland of her childhood – but knows that it no longer exists – so Howard thinks of his grandparents leaving the family shtetl in Lithuania, his grandfather dragging the babies and old folk along on a wagon. Their memories start to intertwine, memories of hiding under stairs and in cellars,, two sad and lonely people, both far from their homelands, neither able to return.
Maeve and Howard is a touching vignette of a show, though at times it feels so ephemeral that it threatens to slip away. I’m not sure how much someone would get from it if they had no previous knowledge of Maeve’s story; so many of the fine details make reference to events in Maeve’s childhood, but there is little time in a show of this length to explore them.*
Ian Gledhill brings out Howard’s supportive, quietly generous nature and his innate pessimism well. I don’t know if Howard Moss really had a cardigan, but this was the perfect accessory for the ’50 year old man-child’, who seeks security as much as Maeve does, but at the same time loves her vivacity and joie de vivre.
Clarke did seem very occasionally to stumble over her lines, but she brings great exuberance to this volatile, enigmatic character. One can certainly see why Howard was so enchanted by her, just as she saw in him a fellow wordsmith, a fellow loner, a fellow exile.
Maeve and Howard is directed by Mick Connell, with lighting and sound by Kyle Attwood. It is a Plush Tiger production. The show is at Venue 53, theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Stephenson Theatre) at 15.05 until 17th August. Tickets here.
*Angela Bourke’s biography Maeve Brennan, Wit, Style and Tragedy: an Irish Writer in New York is a good read for those who want to know more.
