'A literary gem': debut play set for Mullingar run after Jersey acclaim

Eilís Ryan

A standing ovation on the opening night and a glowing review in the Jersey Evening Post have just confirmed what was clearly the case: Rochfortbridge writer Yvonne Heavey’s debut play more than hits the spot – it provides not just great entertainment, but also great insight into 1990s Ireland.

‘The Wake of Yer Man’ opened on St Patrick’s Night at the Jersey Arts Centre, and apart from the hugely positive feedback from audiences, the Jersey Evening Post’s reviewer, Rod McLoughlin told his paper’s readers that Yvonne had “managed something remarkable”, in creating not simply hilarious farce, but simultaneously something moving and poignant.

The play was unique in that the cast was based in two different locations: half in Jersey, where Yvonne now lives, and half in Mullingar. The director, Daniel Egerton, who lives in Mullingar, travelled between the two locations as he worked the cast along the route to eventual unification.

It had been really important to Yvonne that the accents were authentic, which was why actors from this area were selected to join the Jersey crew and Katie Purdue, who played Polly; Elisa Cañas, who played Nancy; Alannah Looby and Meadhbh Hughes, Clare Egan as Bernadette and Mick Gilmartin were the Mullingar actors who travelled over.

The play comes to Mullingar on May 1 and May 2 – and for that staging, the Jersey crew will be travelling to Ireland.

Yvonne was thrilled at how the production went: “People were off the scale laughing and the feedback has been phenomenal, and people afterwards were kind of saying: ‘Oh it was a shame: I couldn’t get a ticket’.”

Initially booked for a two-night run, the play sold out quickly, and so after some scrambling, due to the heavy schedule of events at the Jersey Arts Centre, an afternoon slot was procured to facilitate a third performance.

Since the play ended, Yvonne has been reviewing the video of the performance, assessing what parts worked best, what parts needed more attention, and tweaking and refining it further in advance of its Irish run, to which she is greatly looking forward: “I’ve been working constantly on the script, like condensing it and making it more snappier, really bringing it more alive,” she says.

Things that definitely do not need tweaking are the cast or production selection.

“They were phenomenal. And they just melded. There were some great relationships developed,” says Yvonne.

To some extent, the world portrayed was foreign to the Jersey audiences, given that the island is quite Methodist, and so, would not have that familiarity with an almost completely Catholic society, or the Irish way of dealing with death.

“So it was an insight for them,” says Yvonne.

Seán Lynch from Mullingar Arts Centre travelled over, and Yvonne, who received much assistance from him in the run-up to the opening of the production, says he was “phenomenal”, and he is now on board for the next run of the play.

“He seems to think we have got a bit of a literary gem in our hands,” says Yvonne.

“I think he thinks it’s got legs, and there’s something to it, because it’s a time capsule.

If you think about all these women that are the infrastructure of the community in Ireland, it’s never really been recorded in Ireland about these women. You know, we know about them, but we’ve never really captured that. And I think the story that runs through it is, like, this little piece of history that we need to capture for our culture.”