Dublin Gothic
Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Barbara Bergin’s new play at the Abbey is rooted in one place yet covers an extraordinary amount of ground. Set in and around a tenement in a reimagined version of the “north city innards”, Dublin Gothic features more than 100 characters, performed by a cast of 19, over the course of three and a half hours (with two intervals).
Beginning in the late 19th century, the action spans the Easter Rising, the emigration-ravaged postwar era, and the heroin and Aids epidemics of the 1980s.
We encounter many familiar villains: a haughty slumlord, censorious clerics and a scheming politician of Gubu vintage. But Bergin also scrambles our sense of the past by cocking a snook at heavily fictionalised (and renamed) versions of three national heroes. Patrick Pearse appears as the clueless commander of a schoolboy army, James Joyce as a priapic sleazebag and Brendan Behan as a closeted, abusive dipsomaniac.
These character assassinations are conducted in a spirit of arch provocation (balanced by a loving nod to Behan in a ballad set to the tune of The Auld Triangle). But they also highlight Dublin Gothic’s central theme of the debilitating hold of patriarchy. Gratuitous distortions of men’s stories here remind us of how similar treatment has been routinely inflicted on women throughout Irish history.
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That feminist allegory is grounded in a textured central performance by Sarah Morris. As Honour, a streetwalker determined not to sacrifice all that her name implies, she combines poignant flashes of despair with an underlying shrewdness that allows her to skirt the darkest miseries of tenement life. Amid rampant venereal disease, “The pox never lingers on nimble fingers” becomes a refrain that sums up the necessity of devising creative means of survival.
Morris later assumes the role of Honour’s great-granddaughter, Nell Nell, who becomes trapped in a loveless marriage with Dan Monaghan’s Behan stand-in. She simultaneously moonlights as a showgirl (with a nod to the final days of the Theatre Royal) before finding low-key redemption as a freelance typist. Her peculiar delight in the word “amanuensis” alludes to the way she is now ready to take control of her own story.
Despite constant hubbub, Morris remains a subtly dominant presence throughout Caroline Byrne’s well-marshalled staging. Among the supporting cast, there is a standout performance, rich in quirky charisma, from Thommas Kane Byrne as Honour’s son, who becomes an unwitting republican martyr. Kane Byrne then returns as Nell Nell’s intrepid yet luckless gay son, which typifies the byzantine, albeit coherently woven, mesh of characters.
The plot is nonetheless so eventful that, despite its formidable length, Dublin Gothic often feels rushed. Indeed, the material at times seems better suited to the more methodical pacing of a TV series. And while Jamie Vartan’s set effectively frames the action, in its hulking, geometric banality it incongruously resembles a half-finished office block rather than a Georgian house. The dramatic potential of the ghosts evoked in the title is also never fully realised. These are venial flaws in a work of such scale and complexity.
Dublin Gothic is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, January 31st, 2026
