THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne combines an Irishman's flair for spinning yarns with a novelist's eye for that telling detail which will encapsulate a scene or a person. Amazingly, this is his West End debut (and much longed for), although he began his career in Dublin theater. Now resident in Maine, he has built a stellar career in the movies, Broadway and on tv, in such signature shows as In Treatment on HBO.
This one-man show, which started life in Dublin in February, is a gloriously lyrical homage to the people and landscapes of his youth, bringing to life those who shaped his destiny from grim working class streets of Fifties Dublin, where his father was employed as a cooper by Guinness' brewery, to the apex of Hollywood life.
Director Lenny Price, whose forté is usually musical theater, has invested it with a sparky theatricality, lending it pace and visual flair and elevating it above the typical, often rambling or self-indulgent, one man show. He's aided by Sinéad Diskin's beautifully subtle sound design.
Sinéad McKenna's design, a huge cracked mirror, set off by three gilt picture frames or proscenium arches, signals this could be about the unreliability of memory, but Byrne's very carefully chosen tales are anything but. There is a clear eyed confidence to the project (probably fed by therapy) and each story is perfectly honed like the pieces in a mosaic and, crucially, none outstay their welcome.
What could be a self-serving stand-up is transformed by Byrne into a mini masterclass in acting. He brings an incredible diversity of expression and honesty to all the characters whether it's the contrasting emotions washing over the face of the little boy on his first trip to the cinema palace, or the hilarious physical mimicry with which he imbues the motley crew of eccentrics who inhabited his childhood street. There's the guy who drives an invisible tractor, to which the neighbors play along, or the affectionate portraits of his fellow thespians.
A number of overarching themes, familiar from Irish literature, emerge. There's the Baroque Catholicism of his childhood when his boyish inquisitiveness crashes up against idiotic dogma. This leads to the evil banality of the sadism of some Christian Brothers and to more serious sexual abuse by a priest in a Seminary, where he was sent by his parents. That pain no doubt contributed to another of those themes, alcoholism, but unlike the earlier generation of Irish hell-raiser actors he triumphed over that particular demon.
And then there is the pain of exile, familiar to so many of his generation. In a heartbreakingly tender scene Byrne describes being at the bedside of his dying mother and reflecting how he was guilty of denying her the intimacy with him she craved because of the constant need for separation. This is no sensual or sentimental recollection of a childhood but a coming to terms with the, often painful, courses of a life. Like all great storytelling it is totally particular (and leavened with hilarious Dublin wit) but in doing so it attains the universal. We all walk with ghosts, but the point is how do we, if ever, make a reckoning with them. Not to be missed.
