As Joyce was a musician before he ever became a writer, the operatic adaptation of his most beloved short story The Dead currently running in The Project Arts Centre ostensibly references Joyce’s fealty to his musical roots in his fictions. Tapping into the vein of musical references running throughout the original story, director Jo Mangan and composer Ellen Cranitch fuse spoken word and lyric to wonderfully conjure the atmosphere of Joyce’s Christmas in Dublin.
The cast consists of four actors who work seamlessly together, interchanging roles and accents, words and verse, to tell Joyce’s story that is in turns both hilarious and tragic. Centred around a large rectangular table, at which a string quartet and conductor are perched, the actors tell their story whilst moving around the musicians whose melodies take centre stage in both a physical and abstract sense. Music is utilised as a means to advance the dramatic action rather than to simply accompany it, arguably elevating it to a fifth presence onstage reflecting that omniscient character in the original story – the pansophical presence of Dublin in all its varying forms.
Punctuated by verse rather than scenes, the opera continues for seventy uninterrupted minutes, with key changes signalling shifts in mood onstage. Sound and movement coalesce to capture the frenzy of the aesthetics of the party and the audience is asked on occasion to suspend their disbelief with costume changes, role swapping and questionable props used frequently to provoke laughter.
The frenzied atmosphere allows for the symptoms of paralysis that Joyce considered central to the fractured plurality of urban lives to be sensuously realised in the play. Rare moments of real physical connection between Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta and the continuous miscommunication between the various guests at Kate and Julia’s party evoke, through the juxtaposition of word and song, the disconnect at the heart of the original story.
The Dead’s movement from theatre to opera is a careful balancing act expertly mastered by those on stage, adding to the intensity of emotions which builds into a crescendo at the play’s end. The string quartet adroitly generates the warm and frenzied atmosphere of the party so as to allow moments of silence to be ever more poignant. The stirring rendition of The Lass of Aughrim towards the close of the play leads to Gretta’s infamous lovelorn revelation. The silence which follows allows the harrowing nature of Michael Fury’s death to be amplified louder than the music which came before it. This moment of stillness and silence bridges the gap between the audience and the stage, directing our focus to one character – Gabriel Conroy. Through the medium of song, Conroy’s epiphany on the blurring of the categories between the living and the dead is externalised and internalised simultaneously. The intensity of his internal heartbreak is expressed poignantly to the audience through music.
A mesmerising interpretation of one of Joyce’s most beloved short stories, The Dead succeeds in capturing the irrepressible energy of the original tale through the mediums of music and song. The play is every bit as magical as the snow which falls at the play’s open and end, elevating the musicality of Joyce’s language to a masterful new level.