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.
Set to feature in the 1916 commemoration events next year when it tours to North America as part of the Culture Ireland initiative, the show premieres in the Project Arts Centre next week.
The music and libretto have been written by Ellen Cranitch and Tom Swift, who were inspired to develop the piece following an earlier collaboration based on the Melodies of Thomas Moore.
“We wanted to do something bigger and, at the same time, Joyce’s work was coming out of copyright,” says Swift. “When you look at The Dead it’s full of music and references to music. So making it into an opera felt like the obvious choice.”
In setting Joyce’s words to music, Swift was looking out for “the phrases that sing — the phrases with melody.”
“Certainly, it’s very daunting when you’re trying to adapt someone like Joyce,” he says. “And you do spend a couple of weeks just faffing about thinking ‘I can’t do anything with this. It’s set in stone. I’m not worthy.’ But what I’ve really tried to do is ensure that — even if at times it’s not quite the exact structure of his words — it is Joyce’s lexicon. These are the words he uses in the story. And I divert as little as possible from them. We’re also using some short spoken passages that are taken directly from the text and which help to move the story along.”
Notably, much of the drama in The Dead is internal, unfolding in the mind of the protagonist, and this can be difficult to render onstage. But Swift believes opera is the ideal form for conveying such emotion and interiority. Moreover, the show is determined to capture all the immediate energy of the dinner party itself.
“The party is a very lively event and that’s something we’ve tried very much to bring out. As well as packing a huge emotional punch, The Dead is a very funny story at times, with moments of slapstick from characters like Freddy Malins. So we’re not shying away from bringing the levity into it either. It needs that balance.”
The adaptation has retained all of the main events in the story, says Swift.
“I can’t think of any key moment that we’ve disregarded. Of course, with Joyce, it’s hard to say that there’s any section that’s trivial or that’s not weighted with massive meaning and subtext.”
Ultimately, for all its sombre qualities, there is great warmth in Joyce’s story, too, a sense of vitality that should go down well with audiences as we enter the festive period.
“I hope so,” says Swift. “We did a ‘work-in-progress’ version last August and it was on one of the hottest days of the year.
“But it was great, because afterwards the audience told us that they’d had the sense of snow falling and a festive atmosphere.”
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