The Dead
Museum of Literature Ireland, Dublin
★★★★☆
The 40 pages of James Joyce’s The Dead, published 110 years ago as the final short story in Dubliners, have almost as much hold on the Irish psyche as has the paving stone that is Ulysses. So attached are we to its famous last paragraph that it seemed almost insolent when Pedro Almodóvar ended The Room Next Door, his most recent film, with that snowy drift towards “all the living and the dead”.
Now, in a promenade staging in association with Museum of Literature Ireland, Landmark and Anu have elected to wrap the tragicomedy around attendees and allow them to physically brush up against the beloved characters. As directed by Louise Lowe, it is a largely successful enterprise. The audience – sometimes partygoers, eventually just an audience – get a real flavour of Christmas among early-20th-century Dubliners.
Now and then we find ourselves a victim of the logistics – placed, for example, in a holding area for supplementary entertainment while waiting to ascend for the final scene in the Gresham Hotel. At such times Gabriel Conroy’s confusion about his wife Gretta’s unexpected emotional convulsion, the kernel of the story, seems a long way off. All the more so as the site doesn’t allow the image of Gretta poised on the stair, partly visible, listening distraught to Bartell D’Arcy flute his sad ballad. Instead the scene happens in the corner of the diningroom, its focus more diffuse.
This remains a hugely engaging and immensely accomplished evening. We arrive at the museum, on St Stephen’s Green, and, attended politely by a maid, await the entry of the principals. Úna Kavanagh bustles in as the abrasive Molly Ivors. Marie Mullen and Bairbre Ní Chaoimh justify their standing as theatrical royalty with charming performances as the two sisters hosting this annual epiphany event. Marty Rea and Maeve Fitzgerald, as Gabriel and Gretta, catch a class of gentle bickering that has remained unaltered over a century. Their mutual complaints about preparations for the evening would play just as believably if they’d just piled out of their Volkswagen ID.4 rather than a horse-drawn carriage.
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We are then walked next door to Newman House (a building Joyce knew as part of University College Dublin) for chat and dancing in the livingroom, toasts and speeches in the diningroom and, after that peculiar interregnum of song and dance, elevation to a top-floor room standing in for the Gresham.
A gentle warning. Those who, like this writer, dread audience participation as they dread chemical warfare may find themselves forced to engage in the odd nodding exchange with an actor, but there is little here to chill bones of any but the most self-conscious theatregoer. The nature of the staging does, however, emphasise comedy – of which there is much in the source – over the story’s more sinewy emotions. The final confrontation between husband and wife feels like an addendum to the busy production rather than a natural consequence of what has gone before. This is to take nothing away from the sombre sweetness Rea brings to those indestructible closing words.
A singular achievement.
The Dead is at Museum of Literature Ireland, Dublin 2, until Sunday, January 12th, 2025
