It is New Years Eve and the streets leading up to Dublin’s Abbey Theatre are bustling with the chatter of anticipation for Barbara Bergin’s Dublin Gothic. I was initially intrigued by the title’s bold affiliation with the titular genre, as well as it being presented as a “Ghost Story”; a genre that traditionally thrives around Christmas time, and is a central mode in the literary canon when it comes to addressing social issues and cultural values. It is a genre that opens limitless possibilities for innovation, yet Dublin Gothic overlooks this potential and descends down a path of unfortunate clichés, and ultimately contributes little to the conversation surrounding the history of Dublin’s marginalised voices .
Dublin Gothic begins in the 1880s and spans throughout the entire twentieth century, encompassing three different generations living in the same tenement: the Gatelys, the Cumminses, and the Meehans. Each generation has its own detrimental encounter with Dublin’s history; whether this be the 1916 rising, life post-independence, mass emigration, the Aids crisis or women’s liberation. One character connects all of these narratives, Honor Gately, a woman whose ghost lingers on the stage at various moments and comes to symbolize female resistance. This is a play that aims to reintroduce Dublin city through stories from the margins.
The Susan Smith Blackburn prize identifies the play as a “tragicomedy”, and this attempt at engaging with a well established literary history is easily discernable. Nineteen different actors navigate the stage, and a number of them stand in for the Greek Chorus at any given time. They narrate events, comment on the relationship between characters, as well as offer insights on their moral standings. The almost chant-like nature of their speech was functionally disconcerting and elevated the sense unease that is naturally curated through gothic conventions. However, the stage grew exceedingly overcrowded and characters seemed to lose themselves in the sea of actors. The paratextual signals to various literary traditions and its attempt to evoke a legendary past fails this play; its overambition results in a work that ultimately falls flat. For a play that regards itself as having “epic proportions”, its plot plays out like an attempted imitation of an Edna O’Brien novel to no avail.
Additionally, Dublin Gothic is, at its core, a storytelling narrative. The characters all refer to themselves in the third person, and narrate their own movements as they occur. This created an unnecessary artificiality between the audience and the characters and made it increasingly difficult to sympathise with them on any meaningful level. Perhaps this is an entirely calculated decision, one that promises an audience critical distance from the action, yet it neglects the importance of audience engagement. This was unfortunate since each of the actors were incredibly masterful in their performance, especially in their ability to navigate the complexity of the stage and to adapt quickly to changes in setting and character.
The play’s use of space was particularly unconventional and artful – a redeeming factor for the production. As the curtain lifts, one cannot help but admire the intricate staging. The audience is faced with a large stage with a three story wooden structure standing erect in the centre. The structure is made to represent a run-down tenement of the inner city, yet is elevated to a symbolic container of history. It is characterised by its distinct trap doors, ladders and various spatial properties that establish it for the one-hundred year duration of the narrative. Furthermore, through the dialogue and narrative, the characters manage to reinvent a map of Dublin without ever having to leave the structure.
The script showed a lot of promise and its witticisms may have been better received had it been delivered through a different medium, or if its scope had been narrowed down. In an interview with the Abbey theatre, Bergin highlights her attempt at making Dublin simultaneously “strange” and “familiar”- a nod to the uncanniness of her Dublin. The city we see in Dublin Gothic, however, is overly familiar. The three hours in which the play had been performed could have easily been whittled down had it removed its over-used clichés – the same image of drunken fathers, emigration, depictions of Catholicism, and women being wronged by the world in which they live in; all important commentary to make had it taken a more nuanced approach, rather than presenting mere caricatures.
Despite all the glowing reviews from critics, it is difficult to ignore that something is missing. Dublin Gothic appears to be more of a crash-course history lesson than what it had presented itself to be: an insightful piece that reflects on the various failures of the Irish government, pervading patriarchy, memory and the effects of colonialism.
