Opera version brings James Joyce's short story 'The Dead' back to life

Joyce’s classic short story was an obvious choice for a musical adaptation, writes Padraic Killeen.
Opera version brings James Joyce's short story 'The Dead' back to life

IT’S not quite A Christmas Carol and it’s certainly not Mickey Mouse Saves Santa but, in its own distinctive way, James Joyce’s short story The Dead is a quintessential Christmas tale. Set on the Feast of the Epiphany, the story centres on Gabriel Conroy, a middle-class Dubliner who — following a night of song and dance at his aunts’ dinner party — eventually comes to experience an epiphany of his own as he encounters a ghost of times past.

The story — the final one in Joyce’s famous 1914 collection Dubliners — has been adapted on a number of occasions, most notably by American filmmaker John Huston in 1987, and, more recently, by the Abbey Theatre in 2012. Now, one of Ireland’s finest theatre companies, the Performance Corporation, has produced a new opera based on Joyce’s tale.

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