Theatre in Review: Walking with Ghosts (Music Box Theatre)

	Gabriel Byrne. Photo: Emilio Madrid

The mind of Gabriel Byrne is quite the haunted house, populated by a multitude of shades -- some of them comforting, others guaranteed to give you the horrors. There is his mother, who, in her less affectionate moments, mutters, "Oh, don't talk to me about the night you were born. You nearly killed me. You gave the fight not to come, but out you came in the end. And you didn't like it one bit." There is a neighbor, Mrs. Gordon, who "always wore black, and a locket at her throat that had hairs from her dead husband's mustache inside. She wore an eyepatch over one eye and her other eye rolled around like a big marble." There's the Christian Brother whose pedagogical technique involves violent swats with a bamboo cane and admonishments like: "And what will you be any good for? The boat to England. The pick and shovel. If they'll have you."

Indeed, the Dublin of the 1950s and '60s that Byrne describes is, at times, a place of magical apparitions. Riding the bus with his mother on his first day of school, the five-year-old Byrne spies "a man singing a song in Irish. He's drinking a bottle of Guinness and he has no socks. Everyone clapped when he finished." Advised by the conductor that he is on the wrong bus, he pauses long enough to look at Byrne and ask, "What age is the chiseler?" before adding, "School is for the birds. Long life to him, missus." Of course, he is Brendan Behan, and all the riders know it.

By now it should be obvious that, had he not become a distinguished actor, Byrne might have a been a writer of note. Gifted with an angel's tongue and the devil's wit, his misses nothing, whether it is "the waxy flesh" of a nun's hand, the "sinful wind" of a carnival ride that blows up girls' skirts, or the elderly woman "leaning on her gate with her new teeth like a row of fridges." And this is Catholic Ireland, where his father describes the dubious theological concept of limbo as "like a left-luggage room for babies" and where an old school building, dating back to the 15th century, "looked to me like a last rotten tooth."

Strolling through the past in search of the ghost boy that is his younger self, Byrne recalls some of his life's key turning points. The preparations for his First Communion include tea with his mother at a posh hotel and a trip to a glamorous department story for a new suit. The latter having been purchased, he watches with growing shame as she "opened her purse and counted out notes followed by a small bag of coins, one by one down on the counter." It's a fall-from-paradise moment as he suddenly realizes the shabbiness of his old clothes, a sign of the poverty in which his family dwells.

Not yet an adolescent but convinced that he has a vocation, off he goes to a seminary in Wales, where "the biggest relief was I was never hit or humiliated." But there's also the priest who smells of aftershave, offering a brief lecture on heterosexual intercourse before moving in with his sour breath, putting his hand inside the rent in Byrne's gym trousers. (A decades-later attempt at confronting the old abuser is cut short when Byrne realizes his tormentor is too old and feeble to remember the incident.)

Fleeing the seminary, and following a false start as a trainee plumber, Byrne falls in with an amateur acting troupe and at last finds his tribe. This sequence includes, among other things, a riotous essay on the art of the double-, triple-, and quadruple-take and the account of a disastrous early television appearance, which ends in the accidental destruction of a prop, a statue of the Blessed Virgin. His youthful gig on a long-running soap opera doesn't exactly impress his family. After an episode is over, his father, gesturing at Byrne and the TV set, comments, "Isn't television a wonderful thing all the same? There you are, and there you are."

As his career takes off, he takes part in an epic drinking session with Richard Burton, who, on his third bottle of whiskey for the day, describes fame as "like being inside a drum and someone banging on it." This cues Byrne's own struggle with the bottle, which includes some terrible mornings after and a stay in rehab. Perhaps part of his recovery involves coming to terms with his sister, lost to madness in her thirties; his mother, who, he realizes later in life, may have been shaped by loneliness and discontent; and his father, a cooper put out of a job by changing technology, "on the scrap heat at forty-eight."

Byrne appears to be a bit of a ghost himself, his eyes alight with memories both cherished and searing, quietly walking us through his vividly described past. Never an actor to go for big effects, his style here is minimalist, the act of a raconteur confident in the power of his words. One part pub visit and one part trip to the confessional, Walking with Ghosts is an intoxicating experience.

Lonny Price's direction does little to disguise the episodic nature of the event, taken from Byrne's 2021 memoir of the same name, but he clearly trusts the material and sees no need to fancy it up. Sinéad McKenna's set, a series of portals backed by a shattered mirror, as is her lighting are notably restrained and Sinéad Diskin's sound and original music. Joan O'Clery has dressed Byrne in the kind of suit you might see him wear in real life. Here, design rightly takes a back seat to the actor and his story.

"I was tired of slashing my own soul, and I was sick of the roaring life," Byrne says, talking about his path back from the bottle. But what a roaring life it has been and how gorgeously described it is in this intimate get-together with a great actor and the ghosts who have followed him through life. Does he ever catch up with that ghost boy? Do any of us? This is one séance that is very much worth a visit. --David Barbour