Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.With its minutely observed portrait of a Dublin dinner party that builds to a searing evocation of lost love, James Joyce’s The Dead might well be the perfect short story. At 50 pages, it also slots neatly into a standard cinematic or theatrical running time. Following John Huston, who directed the consummate 1987 film adaptation, the multidisciplinary group ANU have reimagined Joyce’s story as a site-specific promenade piece, staged inside Dublin’s Newman House, now home to the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI). Though far grander than the story’s setting in a terraced house on nearby Usher’s Island, the present venue is rich in resonance, for this is where Joyce cut his literary teeth as an undergraduate when the Georgian mansion housed University College Dublin. The story’s protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, graduated from the same institution and, it is implied, also lectures there. These associations conjure a haunted, time-bending aura, amplified by occasional shifts into slow-motion performance and Carl Kennedy’s ethereal sound design.And yet the dominant note of Louise Lowe’s staging (co-produced by Landmark Productions) is one of joyous exuberance. We are first introduced to the arriving characters by Pattie Maguire’s chatty maid, Lily, then thrust into a pre-prandial dance upstairs. My waltzing partner, Roseanna Purcell’s Mary Jane — the story’s unmarried music teacher — confided that this was her chance to meet a man but that she had her eye on somebody else. Such intimate interactions between cast and audience have long been typical of ANU’s work, which has frequently explored Irish revolutionary history and contemporary social deprivation, but the fraught, urgent tone of those exchanges in earlier productions yields here to a more playful, easy-going style that befits the central theme of hospitality. In a similar spirit, Lowe and her collaborators have also taken gentle liberties with Joyce’s text, devising some original dialogue and incorporating lively musical numbers that are absent from the story. The overall effect is to transform an evening that seems brittle and heavy on the page into an infectiously festive occasion.Nonetheless, that merriment is underlain by multi-sided tension. The central clash pits Marty Rea’s Gabriel against Úna Kavanagh’s Irish-language enthusiast Molly Ivors, who reproaches the cosmopolitan intellectual for his indifference to Gaelic cultural traditions. Their conflict triggers a deeper emotional rift between Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, culminating in an intense yet understated psychic journey towards her hometown of Galway and the memory of her dead teenage love. Balancing self-absorption with lithe physicality, Rea brings out Gabriel’s stewing resentment as well as his eloquence and capacity for redemption. Maeve Fitzgerald leans into Gretta’s subdued pain, conveying a world of everyday pathos through a quivering glance or moment of stasis. Among the impeccably co-ordinated cast of 12, there are standout performances from John Cronin as the genial dipsomaniac Freddy Malins and Michael Glenn Murphy, who amplifies the faintly sinister bonhomie of Malins’s fellow bachelor, Mr Browne. Deftly balancing fidelity with innovation, ANU’s The Dead hums with theatrical life. ★★★★★To January 12, thedead.ie
