Entertainment

‘EDEN’ VERY FAR FROM HEAVEN

EDEN

The Irish Repertory Theater, 132 W. 22nd St., (212) 255-0270.

—-

JUST as French cooking is too good for the French, the English language is too good for the English. So the Irish stole it and made it theater.

Eugene O’Brien’s ironically named “Eden,” which opened last night at Charlotte Moore’s Irish Repertory Theater, is a bleak but oddly jaunty picture of a marriage at the end of its tether.

Technically, it’s a two-hander for a couple of actors: a battered, crisis-wracked Adam called Billy (Ciaran O’Reilly) and a warily disillusioned Eve named Breda (Catherine Byrne).

Yet there’s no dialogue, per se. Both actors steam along on their separate streams of consciousness, revealing inner selves that neither would have quite suspected the other of possessing.

Billy is a hard-drinking, shabbily insecure, would-be womanizer. He envies the Lothario-like expertise of a friend he calls “James Galway – the man with the golden flute.” His own flute seems sadly off-key.

His wife, Breda, is a more complex creature. With two children behind her and a future of lonely domesticity before her, she longs for the love she and her husband shared in happier, younger times.

Now she comforts herself with the secret joys of a pornographic novel. She’s also lost weight to make herself attractive to the errant Billy.

One night, these separate lives have the chance to come together. Breda, with her slimmed-down confidence, gets a baby-sitter and goes to the town’s bars and pubs with Billy.

She hopes with burning intensity that he will take her back to their home, and that their love will be reignited.

But Billy has other plans. So, with the last dance tucked away and the last bar closed, Breda finds herself wending her way home alone.

Yet, as she finds to her surprise, not quite alone . . .

This is a beautiful, exquisite play full of insights into the human psyche and the conundrum of modern marriage.

It also suggests that there is a new Irish voice in the theatrical choir: O’Brien’s.

“Eden” has been subtly directed by John Tillinger, imaginatively designed by Klara Zieglerova, and acted with convincingly bruised eloquence.

O’Reilly is terrific as the Irish roaring boy of a Billy, but it is the pained radiance of Byrne’s Breda – who, to be fair, has the better, more unusually envisaged role – that lives luminous in the memory.