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 transition from page to stage feels undermotivated, incomplete. The lively language shifts easily enough from prose to monologue, and Byrne - with his wide, serious face, his bright, worried eyes, his voice like the growl of a polite bear - is compulsively watchable. What the show lacks (and this is true of the memoir, as well) is a sense of why he's examining his life now. In public. Why would a man lay himself bare like this, on Broadway? It's hard to discern because the show all but ignores the latter part of his life and acting career.
Lonny Price directs Byrne's memoir, and too often the staging is overly glitzy, especially with its many dramatic blackouts that signal we're supposed to be awed by what just took place on stage. Byrne's writing is writerly. He's very conscious of wowing us with his poetic description of a nun's waxy hands or a priest's sour breath or the disappearing coastline of Ireland as he travels to a seminary in Great Britain.
2022 | Broadway |
Broadway Production Broadway |
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