The Dead

Maeve Fitzgerald and Marty Rea in The Dead. Image by Patrick Redmond

*****

You are cordially invited to a select gathering at the residence of The Three Graces of the Dublin Musical Society. An annual evening of song, dance, music and merriment to celebrate the festive season. Your hosts advise that their permanent residence at Ushers Quay has fallen into disrepair (a result of successive governments neglecting to preserve it for posterity), compelling them to relocate this year’s celebration to lavish rooms in the Museum of Literature Ireland, number 85 St Stephens Green. Hansoms and cabs are available for those inconvenienced. It will be a themed evening. Inspired by Mr James Joyce’s 1914 short story The Dead, from his esteemed collection Dubliners. Adapted for stage and capably directed by local impresario, Ms Louise Lowe. No RSVP required. This immersive, site specific, promenade event sold out weeks before its opening. However, you might try obtain returns, join the waiting list, or urge the kind people at ANU, Landmark and MoLI to extend the run. I would urge you to do so. For The Dead is one of those singular productions you cannot afford to miss during this, or any other season.

Marie Mullen and Bairbre Ní Chaoimh in The Dead. Image by Patrick Redmond.

For those unfamiliar with Joyce’s most popular, and longest short story, or the excellent 1987 film version by John Houston, The Dead follows Gabriel and Gretta Conroy as a revelation following a song heard at a respectable, if rather tedious Christmas party challenges the very fabric of their lives. The party’s hosts, socialite spinster Aunts Julia and Kate, the beautifully paired Marie Mullen and Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, and their excitable niece, Roseanna Purcell’s adorable Mary Jane, dodder in anticipation of Gabriel and Gretta’s arrival. The audience greeted in the hallway by the excellent Pattie Maguire whose flustered and flushed Lily is on the look out for the couples arrival. Maeve Fitzgerald utterly divine as the charming and vivacious Gretta, a stylish Galway woman about Dublin town waltzing in like a breath of fresh air. Warmly whisking the audience upstairs, followed by the man of the hour Gabriel; Marty Rea wonderful at saying it all when saying nothing, or hiding in plain sight when speaking. Ushered into a large room, the ever brilliant Michael Glenn Murphy’s ebullient Mr Browne regales all present with verve and gusto. The recital the first in a series of leitmotifs about ghostly old loves. This being the world of the sing song, the singalong, the formal dance, the party piece.

John Cronin in The Dead. Image by Patrick Redmond.

What follows is a whirling dervish of delight as stories are told, songs sung, dances danced and characters reveal their personalities and peculiarities, their peeves and passions. Billie Traynor’s superb Mrs Malins dreading the arrival of her son Freddie, a harmless drunk tolerated by the paragons of social virtue brilliantly realised by John Cronin. A superb Oliver Flitcroft as intolerant Bartell Darcy, a renowned singer with a sore throat and an easily bruised ego, and Matthew Williamson as the unflappable Kerrigan, there to ensure the party is always in full swing. Beneath which tensions brew between a married couple, a mother and son, political rivals, and all manner of egoists and eccentrics. Sat at a sumptuous dinner table for a post dinner toast, it all flips in an instant. A song overheard off stage, like a ghost singing across the distance of time, sees Gretta frozen at the door before fleeing back to their hotel room at The Gresham with Gabriel in pursuit. But a little more entertainment before we join them. The bad tempered Darcy singing badly, the party animal Kerrigan dancing like a vaudevillian entertainer, Williamson again stunning with his signature stylings. Even as the moment belongs to Mrs Malins embarrassed rendition of Love’s Old Sweet Song, the leitmotif repeated once more before the party ends in exhausted reverie. Action shifting from a public to a private space, the audience retreating behind the veil of spectators as we enter the twilight bedroom. Almost scandalised to see Gretta in her undergarments; it is the early twentieth century after all. Made witness to a quiet revelation leading to a profound realisation. The couple, backs to each other on the marriage bed, snow falling on the living and the dead, a final image of despair, loss, or perhaps, just perhaps, hope. Rea’s monologue asking if he, and us perhaps, is too afraid to really live or die, being little more than one of the living dead?

Roseanna Purcell, Bairbre Ní Chaoimh and Marie Mullen in The Dead. Image by Patrick Redmond.

Throughout, the juxtaposition of opposites, such as private moments glimpsed in public, evoke the shallowness of social obligation and the largesse of the heart. A heart  often wounded and bleeding. The audience oscillating between spectator and participant. Good natured guests enjoying a toast or a recital, then silent witnesses, like Scrooge accompanied by the Ghost of Christmas past, overhearing Una Kavanagh’s superb nationalist, Molly Ivors, challenge Gabriel over being a West-Brit as they dance. The other dancers reduced to unnatural slow motion, the effect almost cinematic. The sheer scale of Lowe’s vision and direction astonishing given the insane number of moving parts. A flawless ensemble matched by an equally flawless tech. Owen Boss’s understated set, Joan O’Cleary’s extraordinary costumes, Ciarán Bagnall’s mood defining lights ensuring we never enter a museum piece but a living, breathing reality; the past made present. Carl Kennedy’s sound design wonderful, even as his contemporary compositional flourish in the final scene might not be to everyone’s taste for seeming out of place.

Marty Rea and Maeve Fitzgerald in The Dead. Image by Patrick Redmond.

Whilst its timing and setting make it an obvious seasonal attraction, it's easy to forget that what’s being offered is a strikingly brilliant adaptation of Joyce’s The Dead. A story where little happens, where people are petty, where social mores suggest an exhausting game, and where even the best dinner parties have an element of tedium. Something Lowe is unafraid to embrace, knowing it’s an essential part of the audience experience, and of what propels Gabriel to ask what life is for. If the production creaks at the seams in places, it never bursts even if it might come close. The haunting song played off set might see the pivotal scene lose something of its import as Gretta stands with her back turned to the audience and blurred by lights, but it makes the ghostly distance palpable and focuses on Gretta and not the singer. Again, Fitzgerald might tilt towards the histrionic in the bedroom scene risking easy emotionalism or Dickensian exaggeration, but it’s saved by Fitzgerald’s animal howl of grief. With a production of this scale, there will always be issues of balance, of preference, of what might have worked better, Gretta’s exit being a case in point. But to see such comprehensive welding of such disparate ingredients into such a magical whole is simply astonishing. Like your mother’s Christmas Pudding made to her own secret recipe, The Dead is a succulent, scrumptious, multi-layered production of inexpressible delight. One which achieves the miraculous in that it brings The Dead to life.

The Dead by James Joyce, adapted and directed by Louise Lowe, presented by ANU and Landmark Productions in association with MoLI, runs at MoLI until January 12, 2025.

For more information visit The Dead