A memorable musical take on Joyce’s doleful classic
The Dead National tour Until March 4
James Joyce’s short story, set in early 20th-Century Dublin, is such a perfect piece of work in itself that no other medium can really do it justice. The John Huston film was as near as it gets, but the stage is a trickier problem. The surface activity is the easy bit. The difficulty is in the unspoken feelings and the last haunting section, where a mournful song brings past and present together, and a blanket of snow over Ireland casts a chilling damper over everything, including the future.
But the Performance Corporation delivers the humour and personal relationships in a captivating style, tinged with a melancholy that’s never too far away. The show, adapted by Tom Swift, is an attractive rarity, a type of chamber opera, with undemanding music by Ellen Cranitch that combines the chirpy with the nostalgic. Not the least pleasure is the way it’s all choreographed using solos, duets and ensemble pieces mixed with dialogue.
It’s outwardly about the annual New Year celebration at the home of the elderly Morkan sisters. The difficulty is getting under the skin of the central character, the slightly pretentious nephew, Gabriel Conroy, who amid all the jollity is absorbed in his own thoughts about his mother, his after-dinner speech, the mockery of the Gaelic enthusiast, Miss Ivors, and his relationship with his unappreciated wife Gretta.
The three female performers multi-role, using a bonnet, a shawl or anything simple to change character. Rory Musgrave is a splendidly voiced Gabriel, and Ruth McGill is particularly good on those wistful types of songs that Joyce was so fond of. The most important song in the show however, The Lass Of Aughrim, loses some of its poignancy by having Ruth sing it while clearing the table. The song not only changes the mood of the whole evening, it seriously affects the relationship between Gabriel and his wife.
Placing the four musicians and the cast in close proximity had the good effect of seeing them all as a unit, but at times it led to words being drowned out, especially in some ensemble pieces. Most of the humour was in the hands of an ebullient – sometimes too ebullient – Clare Barrett, and the versatile Kate Gilmore was deeply moving in her final heart-breaking speech about Gretta’s former love, but it would be nice if her songs were altered just fractionally to cater for her vocal range.
See www.thedeadopera.com for tour dates