The Dead
Museum of Literature Ireland, Dublin
★★★★☆
You don’t so much attend The Dead as slip, almost conspiratorially, into James Joyce’s Dublin.
We begin at Museum of Literature Ireland, on St Stephen’s Green, before being escorted out and up to the door of the neighbouring Newman House, where we’re instructed to knock.
Lily, the caretaker’s daughter from the first line of Joyce’s best-known short story, greets us as guests. Pattie Maguire plays her with a warm, skittering authenticity: flustered, hospitable, utterly convincing.
The social choreography of the party unfolds around us with an ease that belies its precision. Jonathan Forbes and Maeve Fitzgerald arrive as Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, brushing off the cold. Upstairs, John Cronin’s Freddie Malins lurches into the evening like a man losing his battle with good intentions.
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This production, which features several cast changes since its first run, in 2024, is directed by Louise Lowe, who also adapted Joyce’s story. It takes delight in implicating its audience: Anna Healy’s Mrs Malins leans in and whispers to me, “He took the pledge last January, and look at him now.”
Newman House, a building Joyce attended when it was part of University College Dublin, is the great asset here, a jewel box of greens, pinks, reds and golds that feels naturally festive. Joan O’Clery’s costumes meet the rooms on their own terms: warm-hued silks, beaded trims, long skirts with a ceremonial rustle. It’s a period piece, yes, but never stately or twee; the environment has a lived-in, slightly ramshackle glow.
Promenade theatre is so often awkward, and there are certainly moments when you feel a little herded, but here the form feels not just justified but essential; it folds itself into the story’s themes.
By the time we reach the dinner table and Gabriel rises for his speech, that earnest address to Ireland’s present troubles and the uncertainties hovering beyond them, the room has begun to tilt. The characters speak from a century away, entirely absorbed in their moment, while we sit among them, unacknowledged, almost incorporeal.
The production, which is staged by Anu and Landmark in association with MoLI, understands this uncanny symmetry: Joyce’s partygoers are the dead to us, yes, but we’re just as ghostly to them, haunting their feast with our modern, watchful silence. We are ushered out of the party on a mournful note.
The final ascent to Gabriel and Gretta’s bedroom changes the mood. The lighting becomes cold and ethereal; the initial move toward intimacy gives way to a deeper, unexpected sadness.
Fitzgerald’s performance breaks open here. Gretta’s confession of her first love, her buried grief, emerges with controlled, devastating clarity. She avoids nostalgia; instead, she seems possessed by the memory, seized by a force that arrives unbidden and undeniable.
Touches of magic realism thread through the evening: dancers slowing mid-quadrille, and finally, the famous, breathtaking snow, “falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves ... falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
This perfect story finds a wonderfully playful and resonant expression in one of the city’s great literary sites. It’s a production that honours Joyce without embalming him, letting his world breathe again. A must-see Christmas gem.
The Dead is at MoLI, Dublin, until Sunday, February 1st
