★★★★✰
It’s the kind of unplanned moment only theatre can allow for; the kind that momentarily erodes the boundary between performer and audience to create a team effort. In Walking With Ghosts, Gabriel Byrne reminisces wistfully on the beginning of his days as an actor, recalling with no shortage of warm detail the misfits and amateurs who would serve as the bedrock of his career. They taught him the tricks of the trade, from the art of receiving applause to the perfect double take. Indeed, not only the perfect double take, but the perfect triple and quadruple take as well. At this point, Byrne demonstrates this skill for the audience. He nails it. The crowd’s laughter is hearty, but it doubles in size when Byrne’s face cracks into a smile, bordering on barely suppressed laughter of his own. A burst of spontaneous applause ushers the show on, and Byrne continues his tale with nary a missed beat. Still, this wonderfully unguarded moment is indicative of one of the primary pleasures of Byrne’s new one-man show (now headed to Broadway after a brief West End stint at the Apollo Theatre in September).
Over the course of his long career, one has come to associate the veteran actor with a purposeful stillness. As the embattled psychotherapist anchoring HBO’s In Treatment, Byrne makes an art of listening, ceding the spotlight to his more demonstrative scene partners while somehow remaining the central gravitational force. Often, the series’ chief pleasure is simply to watch Byrne watching others, reading into his subtle shifts of expression and intonation. To see the actor shed this tightly contained presence to let loose a flair for physical comedy and mimicry feels like a revelation. Over the course of this two-hour confessional, Byrne is looser, funnier and even more vulnerable than he may ever have been onscreen, guiding one through a fragmentary tangle of memories with the verve of a natural storyteller.
While Walking with Ghosts can be bracingly honest and sometimes harrowing, the overriding tone is of a warm wistfulness. As the actor recounts vignettes from boyhood, a careful balance is struck between the vantages of wide-eyed youth and clear-eyed experience; yesterday’s feeling and present day’s understanding existing in tandem. A family trip to the carnival is evoked with no shortage of childlike awe, yet Byrne undercuts it with a final note that to walk away from this soaring high was to become newly conscious of mortality and the march of time. Indeed, nothing in the now 72 year-old’s life has gone untouched by time, yet on this bare stage—occupied solely by Byrne, a chair, a table and a stool—the churches and bookstores of a Dublin gone by share the same space as the shopping malls that have since replaced them. So too do childhood tormentors share the space with the aged, frail husks they become.
The joyful sense of belonging of Byrne’s first encounter with acting brushes up against the disillusionment of an encounter with Richard Burton, hollowed out and made lonely by fame. In an especially raw section, Byrne recounts both the early joys and later devastation of an alcohol fixation with equal clarity. The sense is of a perspective gained over time that the actor has not only refused to take for granted, but has channelled with lyricism, humour and honesty. It’s a gift to be invited into his world.
Words by Thomas Messner
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