Gabriel Byrne’s 2020 book Walking With Ghosts covers common territory for an actor’s memoir, recalling entranced first trips to the cinema, personal encounters with heavyweight movie stars and waiting in the wings on Broadway. Its arc, too, is familiar: rags to riches to ruinous addiction – in this case to alcohol at the height of his 90s fame. What sets the book apart is Byrne’s evocative and elegiac, often sensuous prose, particularly when detailing his childhood and what his father called the “theatre of the street” unfolding daily in his Dublin neighbourhood.
This theatrical performance based on the memoir brings Byrne back to the Dublin stage for the first time since 1978, when he appeared at the Gaiety in Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy. Behan himself passes through – seen on a bus by four-year-old Byrne – and Byrne also imitates his idol, Richard Burton, who he starred alongside in a TV miniseries about Wagner.
