An Abbey production haunted by two ghosts

Every adaptation has to face the ghost of the original. But in the case of James Joyce’s story The Dead there are two ghosts. One is the piece itself, a perfect prose performance. The other is an almost equally perfect film, John Huston’s great swansong of 1987. For a production at the Abbey, the latter is perhaps an even more formidable presence than the former.

Huston’s version of The Dead is, among other things, the finest record of a generation of actors who were, or had been, associated with the Abbey itself: Donal McCann’s Gabriel Conroy, Marie Kean’s Mrs Malins, Donal Donnelly’s Freddie, Ingrid Craigie’s Mary Jane.

There is, then, a good reason for Frank McGuinness’s new dramatisation to be self-consciously different. A play is, of course, innately different from a film, but Huston’s screen version is highly theatrical, both in its form and in its use of theatre actors. There is little point in repeating it.

There is also an encouraging precedent for being quite daring: Shaun Davey and Richard Nelson turned The Dead into a musical that, unlikely as it sounds, played on Broadway with Christopher Walken as Gabriel Conroy. Even more unlikely, it worked. So it is a relief to encounter the opening of McGuinness’s version in Joe Dowling’s richly textured production at the Abbey: a black-clad chorus of all the characters emerging from the Dublin darkness, singing Thomas Moore’s Oh Ye Dead. There is the tingling expectation that we are about to get something bold: a quasi-operatic version of the story.

But we do and we don’t. The dramatisation is full of brilliant things but never really makes up its mind whether it wants to be an inspired improvisation on Joyce’s original melody or merely a retelling of the story. At different times it manages well enough to be one or the other, but the two never make up a satisfying whole.

Some of McGuinness’s ideas are terrific. Infusing Thomas Moore so deeply into the action makes complete sense: he is so present in the world of the story that, near the beginning, Joyce has Gabriel think merely of “the Melodies” – no explanation is necessary, for what other melodies could there be? The melancholy romanticism – but also the backward-looking cliches of overfamiliar tunes – set the tone for a story of middle-class life in a “paralysed” city.

Likewise, McGuinness’s additions to Joyce’s internal and external dialogue are often wonderfully apt. Freddie Malins’s dubious anecdote, spoken in an unheard undertone in the original, is given gloriously ribald life. The whole relationship between Freddie and his mother is filled out in bitterly comic dialogue relished by Lorcan Cranitch and Rosaleen Linehan. One of McGuinness’s governing ideas, that the feast of The Dead is haunted by the ghost of the Famine, might be overstated were it not so beautifully handled in two poignant lines – Aunt Kate’s wish that “none of us go hungry in this house or in Ireland tonight” and Gretta Conroy’s memory (given emotional truth by Derbhle Crotty) of the face of her dying lover Michael Furey: “It was haunted by the dead – the dead of long ago.”

Yet these radical thoughts are not really carried through in the production.

The whole affair seems rather too grand, as if some sludge from Downton Abbey has seeped into Joyce’s Dublin. The Misses Morkan are not fine ladies: they’re music teachers. They don’t have a grand house with a ballroom: they rent the upper floor of a “dark gaunt house” from a corn factor. The atmosphere of the story depends on the idea that, as Joyce puts it, “their life was modest”. The annual party is an oasis of pleasure in tough lives – hence its importance. There is little sense of this in the lavish sets and costumes.

This is not just a point of external detail, however. It is crucial to the story that Gabriel feels uncomfortable in this setting. Why? Because he has moved up the social ladder and the Morkans have not. His embarrassment is that of a man returning to people whom he now regards as less sophisticated than himself. He is desperate not to seem to be condescending; hence his nervousness about references to Robert Browning in his speech: “He feared they would be above the heads of his hearers.” The relative opulence of the setting prevents us from understanding why Gabriel is so uncertain and sensitive, why he struggles with his emotions. In Stanley Townsend’s performance he seems merely grumpy.

And this makes the culmination of the piece rather disastrous. Gabriel’s famous peroration is hard to stage, not least because it is so famous. But Mark O’Halloran, in Corn Exchange’s recent version of Dubliners, managed to make it at once wistful and rapturous. Here it is hit by two torpedoes.

One is the cumulative effect of the failure to give Gabriel’s emotional turbulence a rationale. The other is McGuinness’s idea of having the passage delivered directly to the sleeping Gretta, as if it is a realistic speech. It is not surprising that Townsend can’t make this work, but the failure brings a richly thoughtful and sometimes beautiful play to an anticlimactic end. Wet sleet, not dazzling snow, covers the living strengths of The Dead.