Just like the Morkan sisters, the JJAO committee, the cast and the crew are all on hand to welcome guests to the second annual presentation of “The Dead,” the final story in Joyce’s Dubliners. Gabriel Conroy arrives with his young daughter, resplendent in her unicorn costume. (NB: This is not what happens in the story!)
The harpist welcomes guests with music.
Friends find their tables and catch up on the news and travels of the holiday season. The atmosphere is warm and welcoming.
But soon the tinkle of the harp is joined by the sweet, soaring notes of a young woman singing.
The room hushes.
And when the songs are finished, the narrator steps forward to begin the story.
The Morkans’ guests pair up for the Quadrille dance. Gabriel has been worrying about the after-dinner remarks he composed. Would his speech be too sophisticated for his audience? His dance partner is Miss Ivors. “I have a crow to pluck with you,” she scolds. She berates him about his preference for a continental vacation, rather than travelling to the West of Ireland to get to know his own country better. Isn’t his wife, Gretta, from Connaught, she asks? “West Briton!” she hisses at him as she stalks away.
“We really are all hungry,” observes one of the dancers. “And when we are hungry, we are quarrelsome.” And with that, the guests break away from the story to enjoy the afternoon tea…
…and the sandwiches and desserts.
Following the tea break, Gabriel delivers his speech which concludes with a rousing chorus where everyone stands to sing “For they are jolly gay fellows.” The party begins to wind down. Gabriel waits for his wife, Gretta, at the bottom of the stairs. But she is entranced by the sound of a tenor named Bartell D’Arcy singing “The Lass of Aughrim.”
Gabriel and Gretta take a horse-drawn cab through the snowy streets of Dublin back to the hotel room they have booked for the night. The sight of his wife listening to the tenor’s tragic song has lit a passion in Gabriel. He contemplates how much he loves his wife, but when they are alone in the hotel room, she seems distant and preoccupied.
She acknowledges that she has been thinking about a boy named Michael Fury. She was fond of him back when she lived in Galway. This arouses Gabriel’s jealousy and he demands to know whether she is still in love with Michael Furey. He’s dead, she replies – died at age 17.
“And what did he die of so young, Gretta?” asks Gabriel. “Consumption, was it?”
“I think he died for me.”
Through her sobs, Gretta tells the story of Michael Furey and how he used to sing that same song, “The Lass of Aughrim.” His heart was broken when he learned that Gretta had to leave her grandmother’s home to attend school at a distant convent. In the middle of a rainy night, he threw pebbles at her bedroom window and waited for her in the garden in the rain. She pleaded for him to go home before he caught a chill, but when she had only been a week at the convent, she learned he had died.
The passion and sorrow with which she tells Michael Furey’s story precipitates a riot of emotion in Gabriel. “Generous tears filled his eyes. He had never felt that way himself towards any woman, but he knew such a feeling must be love.”
While she sleeps, he broods on how shallow his understanding of his wife has been – how absent of passion has been his own life. And as the snow continues to fall beyond the window, he contemplates how enduring are the links that continue to tie the lives of the living with the legacies of the dead.
Appearing in “The Dead” were: Dermot Guinnane as Gabriel Conroy; Niamh O’Brien as Gretta Conroy; Phil O’Brien and Eileen Cassidy as Narrators; Ciara Julia Hall as Miss Ivors; Aisling O’Brien, Eileen Cassidy, Rosemary O’Brien, Nora Pat Marshall, and Paula McCann as dancers; Geoff White as Bartell D’Arcy; Ciara Julia Hall singer; Nora Pat Marshall harpist; Frank Cassidy whistle.
