Gabriel Byrne on stage. In his own words.
By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Walking with Ghosts is a delightful portrait of the people and landscapes that ultimately shape our destinies. A Landmark production, it comes to Broadway direct from wildly successful runs in London’s West End; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Dublin, Ireland.
As a young boy growing up on the outskirts of Dublin, the stage and screen legend sought refuge in a world of imagination among the fields and hills near his home, at the edge of a rapidly encroaching city. Moving between sensual recollection of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and commentary on stardom, the actor-writer returns to Broadway to reflect on a life’s journey.
Adapted from his best-selling memoir of the same name and directed by Emmy Award® winner Lonny Price, Walking with Ghosts is written and performed by Gabriel Byrne (Hereditary, HBO’s In Treatment).
The play - a theatrical adaptation of Byrne's 2020 autobiography - takes a familiar approach: one man tracing the arc of his life, layering universal tragedies such as mental illness, alcoholism and abuse with the specific intricacies of an upbringing in mid-twentieth-century Dublin. In doing so, he reveals existential truths about the human condition, the vulnerability of love and the loneliness of fame. What's never revealed, however, is a unique or functional point of view about it all. Any chance of this production lifting from memoir recitation to illuminating theatrical experience is squashed by Lonny Price's artless direction and the design team's unembellished hand. And when a play's subject is void of any real color, all a spotlight does is wash it out.
This is the sort of theatrical memoir for which the term 'lyrical' must have been invented. Recounting the story of his early life and only briefly dipping into the sort of show business anecdotes (none of them particularly juicy, alas) for which some gossip-craving theatergoers might be hoping, the piece is so quintessentially Irish that you'll find yourself craving a Guinness on the way home. Redolent of both James Joyce and Eugene O'Neill, two writers whose work Bryne has performed in his lengthy career, Walking with Ghosts feels far more literary than theatrical.
2022 | Broadway |
Broadway Production Broadway |
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