Theatre review: Immersive adaptation of The Dead has audience being led through Museum Of Literature
Marie Mullen and Bairbre Ní Chaoimh in The Dead. Picture: Patrick Redmond
- The Dead
- MoLI, Dublin
- ★★★★☆
In ‘The Dead’, James Joyce left us a perfect short story to finish his collection Dubliners. In his 1987 adaptation, John Huston also crafted something perfect: a film without flaws, which seems to resonate more with each viewing, each passing year. It’s a high bar, in other words, for any new version.
What unites these two is the powerful sense of intimacy they create. Joyce achieved it with skillful economy and cunning word choices. The technique is there in the very first line: “Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.”
Now, of course, we know she was not “literally” run off her feet. But we also know that young Lily would say just that: “literally”. And so it goes, a roving, free narrative voice that settles where it may, and shares individual intimacies amid the gregariousness of the gathering. Huston’s cameras do something like that, allowing us to eavesdrop as they move through Georgian rooms so painstakingly recreated in a warehouse outside Los Angeles. You could call them both, indeed, rather immersive.
And that is the very word used by ANU and Landmark Productions in association with MoLI for their promenade staging of the story: an “immersive experience” is promised, swapping the “dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island” where the Misses Morkan held their annual Twelfth Night dance for the rather more splendid surrounds of Newman House on St Stephen’s Green.
We gather in the lobby of the Museum of Literature, before going in next door to Newman House itself, greeted there by Lily, who is indeed still run off her feet, though she notably avoids using the word “literally” this time. We are here as guests, and upstairs we can already hear the piano playing, the chat and laughter and singing as the sisters fret about the late arrival of those poor timekeepers, Gabriel Conroy (played by Marty Rea) and his wife Gretta (Maeve Fitzgerald). The pair arrived, we are whisked upstairs, and immersive it is indeed. Soon we are dancing cheek-by-jowl with the cast, whirling about the drawing room at each shout to switch partners.
But there’s room for quiet asides too, as when poor, drunk Freddie Malins’s mother frets about him, or when Gabriel and Gretta have a sharply whispered exchange over Molly Ivors. It is his confrontation with the latter that upsets Gabriel’s self-satisfied complacency. Everything slows down in an expressionistic choreographic touch typical of director Louise Lowe’s method, as Una Kavanagh’s headstrong nationalist Ivors challenges “west Briton” Gabriel’s writing for a unionist newspaper. It’s a tense exchange that resonates across the evening, as Gabriel’s spits, “To tell you the truth, I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!”
We follow on into the dining room, to find a table long enough to fit a good number of the audience, who might get to share a little small talk with Mr Browne (Michael Glenn Murphy), or have a “sweetie” given them by Marie Mullen’s perfectly judged Aunt Julia. If you’re used to seeing Frank Patterson’s affable Bartell Darcy in the film version, it’s a shock to find him so sharply belittle the Dublin music scene, as Oliver Flitcroft plays the famed tenor as a cantankerous snob. Tensions like these, foregrounded by Lowe, bring a sense of the Ireland outside these tall windows into the party in interesting ways.
It’s a shame that, after Gabriel’s speech, the drama should be derailed by something as humdrum as logistics, the practical necessities of crowd and space management. Gretta’s iconic moment on the stairs, as she hears Darcy sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, is relegated to a side door, and as half the audience follow the couple back to their hotel room for the well-known finale, the rest of us are left with what feels like an after-party, and one as forlorn as those usually are.
Matthew Williamson’s charming dance and magic act is welcome, and a recital of Molly Bloom’s old favourite, Love’s Old Sweet Song, is fine, but it all feels like we’re filling time, or worse, facing a Hamlet without the prince. In the end, we do rejoin the Conroys, going up a narrow stairs to their room at the Gresham, where Fitzgerald imbues with rawness Gretta’s resurgent feelings for the boy who died for her all those years ago. Rea’s Gabriel is angrily self-reproachfing as he realises he’s never loved anyone like that.
It’s intense, yet feels less inevitable conclusion, more epilogue. Unlike the story and the film, it's imperfect. The spell has been broken.
Still, the casting of the spell, the world created here, from the giddy welcome to our final parting, “the snow falling faintly”, makes this a memorable evening.
- Until January 12 at MoLI, the Museum of Literature Ireland
