In 2016, Mike McCormack published Solar Bones through Dublin’s own Tramp Press, effectively setting  the story of Marcus Conway (Stanley Townsend) into motion. An experimental novel immediately met with high acclaim, Solar Bones became the third most sold Irish novel of the last decade; winning  the Goldsmith Prize (2016) and the Dublin Literary Prize (2018), as well as being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2017).  Off the back of these successes, and with plenty of post-pandemic optimism, Solar Bones took to the stage of the Abbey Theatre in October 2022. The theatrical adaptation was written by Michael West in collaboration with the Corn Exchange Theatre Company, famous for their re-imaginings and ambitious adaptations of celebrated works of fiction such as James Joyce’s Dubliners.

Colin Barrett of The Irish Times describes Solar Bones as “a posthumous recording, an auto-elegy, an archive of a life being undone even as it is exposited.” Tactful and true as Barrett’s comments are, the inevitability of Conway’s unraveling is not centered around his death, which we learn about at the end of the performance in the stage adaptation. His unraveling becomes a process of acknowledging grief, an extended metaphor for the cycles of loss and recovery. The accumulated layers of personhood collected by Conway over the course of his life begin to slough off of him as the play unfolds. In the simple act of removing his jacket, Townsend conveys  this shedding of emotional layers through removing articles of clothing which separate and protect humans from the natural world. Conway’s unraveling, then, echoes that of a spool and thread: one single line that reflects a leftover recording of consciousness. 

Solar Bones opens with the tolling of the Angelus bell over the city of Louisburgh, County Mayo, where Conway appears in a helter-skelter assemblage of lumbers and plastic-covered appliances. Overgrown with flora and dusty from disuse, the set reflects Conway’s mind itself, indicative of the departed presence of his wife Mairead. In spite of her absence, Conway finds two papers on the counter, one local and one national, the reading of which makes up  his morning ritual before leaving for work. He relies a great deal on rituals: this morning rituals, his work rituals, and family rituals. And yet he seems oblivious to the world around him until it is too late, living on through emotional pitches left in his memory, playing on like a reel in the attic. Solar Bones comes across like a warning about the dangers of thoughtless behaviour, the moment after of life of which Conway experiences in the play.

Michael West notes in the playbill that Conway’s loss is “not of his own existence, but that he will never see his family again.” Indeed, the true loci of Solar Bones include Conway’s fatherhood, marriage, and all those human aspects of daily life existing in the periphery of the exhausting modern world. Some of that intimacy is shown while he tends to his wife’s health, or muses on what paternity means in the twenty-first century: video chats using Skype. All the while, we question Conway’s attentiveness and absorption with his family life with a fixed interest. His  relationships squirm under the pressure of nostalgia, but he never glamorizes family life at the expense  of speaking his own truth, an act that builds his integrity over the course of the play.  

Conway describes his feeling of dislocation, his sense that “some imp had got in during the night and shifted things around… stuff just marginally out of place.” This digressive aspect of the work creates wonderful irony, since Conway himself (being an engineer) is a master of specificity and constructions. By dying, Conway frees himself of the order and structure that would have kept him from digressing in his own life’s story. Essentially, the only version of Conway the audience could have known was the deceased Conway: who frames his own life not in terms of logic and structure, ways in which an engineer would instinctively, but rather in terms of those people he loved and cared for the most.

Thanks to the brilliant direction of Lynne Parker and the adapted script by Michael West, along with the immensely talented Stanley Townsend as the sole actor, the Abbey Theatre’s October production of Solar Bones posed more questions than answers about the ways in which we frame our lives and find meaning in the people we love. Solar Bones played from 20-29 October, and was honored with wonderful reviews from the Irish Times, The Arts Review, and the Sunday Times.