Walking with Ghosts @ King's Theatre

In the online author’s note to Walking with Ghosts, Gabriel Byrne aptly observes that: “In the history of Ireland, emigration is like a psychic scar." The pain of centuries worth of displacement and forced exile – so central to Irish diasporic music and oral traditions – are woven with beautiful precision throughout the stage adaptation of his best-selling 2020 memoir, chartering his remarkable journey from a childhood in Ireland to a career in Hollywood.

Despite this, Walking with Ghosts is not a play about fame or fortune. Byrne devotes a surprisingly small amount to documenting his meteoric ascent into acting royalty, or his (very public) traumas and tribulations. At its heart, Walking with Ghosts is a tribute to the small, often unremarkable moments that never leave us no matter how far we travel. The pressure of a hand on the first day of school. The giddy thrill of a fairground ride. Long nights spent watching grownups exchange their tales of crossing the sea in search of something better, sat atop the same velvet-topped barstool so central to Sinéad McKenna’s stage design. These universal threads of emigrant narratives pull the audience back with Byrne through mists of time, towards the disembodied voices and snippets of music carefully conjured in Sinéad Diskin’s soundscape.

“I never listened to you when you were alive,” Byrne tells the ghost of his father, “But now that you’re dead, I can hear you.” In the end, perhaps the true strength of Walking with Ghosts lies in the generosity of its final gift to the living. Our ghosts, as Byrne reminds us, are closer than even the title of his play might suggest. They are still just as loved for all the time that has passed – still just as much a part of us.

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Walking with Ghosts, King's Theatre as part of Edinburgh International Festival, run ended; Apollo Theatre, London, 6-17 Sep (presented by Landmark, Neal Street and Playful Productions)