Theatre Review: The Dead School - Galway i

3/5

Featuring the talent of Galway Youth Theatre and Galway Community Theatre, and directed by Andrew Flynn of Decadent Theatre Company, this charismatic adaptation of Pat McCabe’s 1995 novel is bursting with energy and teeming with ideas, but it is let down somewhat by an overdrawn finale.

The story centres on the mental deterioration of two schoolteachers from very different generations, the hard but decent paragon of ‘old school’ Irish propriety, Headmaster Raphael Bell (Gerard Howard), and his directionless colleague, the fantasist Malachy Dudgeon (Jarlath Tivnan). Both are marked by traumas in their childhood, but it is the torturous cultural transitions at work in 1970s Ireland that will undo them in the end.

As you’d expect from a play based on McCabe, the show is spiked with deliciously macabre comedy and the ensemble cast make great hay with it. Elsewhere, the set works small miracles, managing to turn a small and quite confined space into the convincing site of a schoolroom full of schoolchildren and the respective homes of both protagonists to boot.

The costumes are also fantastic, vividly representing the ideological conflicts between the 1950s and the 1970s. Moreover, McCabe’s novel Dudgeon is identified with his love of the 1969 film, Midnight Cowboy, and by way of costume and song, Flynn underlines the resonances between that film’s sad small-town character and Malachy himself. Flynn also makes imaginative use of sound with the motif of a click that recurs throughout the play as if a deathwatch beetle were signalling the disintegration of both Irish culture and Raphael Bell’s mind.

The gradual deterioration of both Bell and Dudgeon is too laboured and repetitive by the end, so the conclusion peters to a halt. But this is nevertheless bold and bracing theatre.