Theatre Review: The Dead School - Galway i
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.
