The Dead
Smock Alley
***
It's not difficult these days to make contact with The Dead. James Joyce's perfectly wrought short story, also exists as a film, at least three different plays, a Broadway musical, and, most recently, an opera. The story of Gabriel Conroy at the Christmas party of his aunts, still awkward and flustered after all these years, and his quietly devastating realisation on the Feast of the Epiphany is fast running out of things to be.
That it is a tale worth telling, nobody can deny. This performance is something like a fitting party piece: first staged at Shakespeare's Globe and brought spiritually home by Dublin Theatre Festival, it is a reading of the entire text by Aidan Gillen with occasional elegiac piano accompaniment from Fergal Murray, both in white tie and tailcoats on a sparse setting of Edwardian furnishings and oil lamps. It drips with nostalgia.
Gillen has committed some sections to memory, but otherwise reads from a large text at a desk, leaning back with his head high as though fortuitously long-sighted. With director Conor McPherson, they straddle the distinction between a reading and performance, Gillen distinguishing between various voices, but otherwise eschewing pronounced characterisation, delivering the words at a brisk clip.
Intriguingly, for a story so full of music, Murray’s compositions offer more counterpoint than correspondence. He often stays silent through descriptions of songs, then offers a forlorn melody to amplify Joyce’s subtext (sometimes, as during the joyful toast to the Morkan sisters, a little needlessly). It can be a bracing discrepancy, just as sparseness of McPherson’s staging goes hard against the described abundance of the celebration.
This is not an easy text to orate, and Gillen does well to keep it flowing, best when allowing himself the brief cadences of a moithered aunt, party boor or trilling biddy. But more often he falls into a delivery that is tight-lipped and oddly cruel (the similarity to his celebrated Haughey performance is eerie) and it colours Gabriel and – more fatally – the character of the narration itself as something bewilderingly sinister.
The epiphany of Joyce's story, a realisation that Gabriel hardly knows his wife, himself, or the feeling of overwhelming love, may be one of the most remarkable expressions in literature, a discovery that is dumbfounding but not bitter. Here, Gillen actually seethes through the whole exchange, as though it were nothing but female taunts ("I think he died for me") against a lusty, bruised male ego. It becomes an excessively poisonous interpretation, venomous to those last transfixing words.
Still, it is just an interpretation, one of countless others from every adaptation to every reader, drifting through the universe as plentifully as snowflakes. Readings are just for Christmas. The story is forever.
Ends January 9
