‘Walking With Ghosts’ Review: Gabriel Byrne Roams His Past

The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne has a genius for listening. On the HBO show “In Treatment,” playing a psychologist wrestling with his own internal conflicts, he spent minutes at a time in silence, as tides of concern and compassion flowed and ebbed across his handsome, craggy face. But “Walking With Ghosts,” his autobiographical one-man show at the Music Box Theater, directed by Lonny Price, finds him alone onstage, within a series of retreating golden frames. And so Byrne, with no one to listen to, kindles into speech.

The show is drawn, often verbatim, from Byrne’s recent memoir of the same name. Slipping back and forth in time, the book traces the 72-year-old actor’s life from boyhood on the rural outskirts of Dublin to his eventual success. The wispy show, by contrast, follows a strict chronology, but even here Byrne favors association over causality, image over argument — offering a slide show of the mind, with little relation between and among the anecdotes. He claims to feel like “an intruder in my own past. Emigrant, immigrant, exile.” Yet his recollections are vivid and immediate. At times the form echoes Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” a catalog of experiences that will go on to shape the mature artist’s mind and soul.

“Walking With Ghosts” has the texture of a vanity project. Nearly every autobiographical show does. And during a preview performance, the audience — “In Treatment” fans, perhaps, or devotees of Byrne’s 1995 film “The Usual Suspects” — rewarded that vanity, laughing at jokes before Byrne delivered the punch lines, sighing sympathetically at the sad parts. But Byrne is a serious writer, rendering memory and image in the energetic vernacular of his childhood: “slingeing along,” “stravaging,” “gobdaw.” And he is a serious actor, too, which eases the self-indulgence. The script, while often mournful, allows him to show a playful side and a gift, neglected in Hollywood, for physical comedy. In one sequence, he imitates the oddballs of his boyhood. In another, he shows how the various actors in the amateur theater troupe he joined take their bows. Who wouldn’t want to spend a clinical hour with this man? Or two, plus intermission.

And yet, 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.

“Walking With Ghosts” never provides satisfying answers, even as it keeps the focus relentlessly on Byrne, with little to distract from his performance. He wears the same clothes throughout — blue shirt, blue vest, blue blazer, gray slacks — and he sketches characters sparingly, with accents and funny voices kept to a minimum. Byrne, who last visited Broadway in 2016 with “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” appears at ease on the stage, bestriding it as easily as another man might stroll his own patio.

For better or worse, Price’s direction is mostly unfelt. Price has him move backward, beyond another arch or two, as he reaches into the past and forward as he nears the present day, finally sitting at the lip of the stage as he discusses his alcoholism and the sobriety he ultimately achieved, twentysome years ago. Otherwise the interventions are few.

The design can also feel less than intentional, slapdash almost. As imagined by Sinéad McKenna, the set’s back wall is a mirror, riven with cracks. Apt enough. But the way in which the lights (McKenna) play against it turns Byrne’s shadow upside down, so that it lurks behind him, like a vampire bat. The sound and music, by Sinéad Diskin, come and go, sometimes offering a sense of place, at other times leaving place ambiguous, universal.

Byrne unearths embarrassing memories and painful ones, like the death of a boyhood friend and an incident of predation by a priest at the seminary he attended for a few years. Later, he finds that the priest doesn’t remember him. Byrne, though he has blacked out some of what occurred, can’t forget it. But in general, he seems to have had that rare thing for an artist — a happy childhood, loved by parents who loved each other. He is elegiac in recalling a celebration at the Guinness brewery, his grandmother’s love of the movies.

Whether discussing good memories or bad ones, the show rarely draws connections — the kinds a clinician might encourage — between the boy Byrne was and the actor he became. In fairness, neither does “The Prelude.” At times, Byrne suggests some internal restlessness and malleability, an inability to settle himself to any particular practice or trade, which may have fitted him for acting. (With the priesthood barred, he rapidly cycled through stints as a plumber, a dishwasher and a toilet attendant.) But aside from one comic story about scenery chewing — and scenery breaking — on an early television play, he never discusses his practice or art. The boy and the professional man seem to exist separately, not continuously.

The show seems to conclude with a kind of resignation and acceptance, that if the people of his past are dead now, they persist within him. How those ghosts have made him and shape him and haunt his work still? That remains unspoken.

Walking With Ghosts
Through Dec. 30 at the Music Box Theater, Manhattan; gabrielbyrneonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.