Barbara Bergin is shaking her head in disbelief. Outside the Abbey Theatre, in the middle of Dublin, shoppers, tourists and people who work nearby are passing a row of posters with her name on them, advertising her new play. Inside, in the theatre’s auditorium, the 19-strong cast of Dublin Gothic are milling around the astonishing set as Caroline Byrne, its director, puts them through their paces during the final week of rehearsals.
Some of them are on the top floor of the set, which its designer, Jamie Vartan, has created to mimic a 19th-century tenement building, plus a plethora of other locations. Others are walking around with picture frames attached to their heads, ghostly portraits of their former selves. A few are literally kicking up dust on the ground floor. (Yes, explains the show’s producer, that is real peat carpeting the national theatre’s stage.)
“It’s amazing,” a wide-eyed Bergin says. “I can’t quite believe it. We’re working quite late and long days, and the first night I got home I just walked up the stairs and went straight to bed. When I woke up in the morning I thought I’d dreamed it all.”
Dublin Gothic is a play that the actor and playwright thought would never be staged. The multigenerational story, set across the 100 years from the 1880s to the 1980s, follows the fortunes of three families – the Gatelys, the Cumminses and the Meehans (and their descendants and neighbours) – who live in Dublin’s inner city, at the fictional 1 O’Rehilly Parade. It has 154 characters, and a running time of three and a half hours. “Ambitious” doesn’t quite do it justice.
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The idea for the sprawling story took root 15 years ago. “I wanted to do a kind of loser’s history,” Bergin says. “I like stories about near misses, like when you look down the laneway at the wrong moment and everything turns out differently.
“Dublin was a no-brainer as a backdrop, because it’s where I’ve lived all my life. So I did a good bit of research, and then I did an outline, and suddenly all these characters started to show up, and I couldn’t really stop them.
“But it seemed so big and vast that I thought this is obviously a TV show, but then I was swiftly told that it was going to be too expensive to make.” She sighs. “And then I thought radio might work, because it’d be cheaper, but that was a really drawn-out process, and it ultimately didn’t happen. So then it began its journey here.”
Encouraged by people she encountered at the Abbey, Bergin set about reworking the text into something more manageable, helped by workshops and advice from dramaturges. Covid delayed everything, but Caroline Byrne says that when the script landed in her lap, in 2021, she felt an instant connection to the story despite not being from the city.
“I’m a country girl,” she says. “But I think what’s really nice is, by not being from Dublin, I actually have a bit of an outsider’s eye. I work at the Abbey as an associate director, and part of my job is to read scripts. A group of us gather to read scripts every few months, and one of them was Dublin Gothic.
“I remember reading the first two pages, and I just had that instinct of ‘I can direct this.’ I never would approach a script like that; generally as an associate director, I’d just be looking at it as a piece of work, assessing it for the team and thinking about its merits. But this was one that I just thought, Oh, this is for me.”
Byrne, who also directed the Gate’s well-received 2024 production of Dancing at Lughnasa, describes Dublin Gothic as the theatrical equivalent of a TV box set. “It’s incredibly dramatic. It opens with a very strong image, and it moves at such a lick,” she says. “There were also a lot of different registers in the play, like the narrator and the inner-voice scenes, and there’s a lot of physical action.
“It put me in mind a little bit of Dickens, and I had done a version of Oliver Twist over at Regent’s Park [in London], which was a huge epic as well. I didn’t know how I would do it, but I just felt really drawn to it. I felt like I understood that world, the Gothic world, the darkness and the shade. I just felt like I could see it. And once that takes hold with a director, it’s hard to be neutral about it.”
It is, she agrees, a bold programming choice for the Abbey’s Christmas production, “because it’s not Christmassy in a traditional sense. But, when I think about its themes, there is a sense of renewal. It definitely feels like it’s a really big night out, and I hope that it will be really entertaining at the same time.
“It’s very funny, the writing is so beautiful, the plot is excellent and the characters are tragic and comic; they’re all struggling to dignify themselves and their story. So it has a great mix of all the emotions. It’s a really big workout for the head – there’s a huge family tree that has to be followed – and I hope that will be really satisfying.”
The cast includes an array of Dublin actors, some of them from the part of central Dublin where the play is set. On a break from rehearsals, Kate Gilmore and Gus McDonagh agree that they’ve never been part of a show of this scale before. In fact, the last production Gilmore did here, on the Peacock stage, was Safe House, Enda Walsh’s polarising one-person play, in 2024.
“That was frightening because I was on my own, and this is frightening because it’s so big – you find different things to be scared of every time you do a show,” she jokes. “It is nice to have the camaraderie, though. You do miss that in the dressingroom and backstage.”
“It’s a really challenging piece,” McDonagh says. “It’s big, it’s unapologetically dramatic, it’s incredibly linguistically beautiful – and it’s difficult. So you do go, ‘Oh s**t, I really want to take a bite of that – but it’s not going to be easy.’
“But I love Barbara’s writing; she’s a buzzer, and it comes across in what she’s made. She loves people and she loves Dublin. You watch Barbara chatting to people and you can see her listening to their stories. She loves mining people for the craic. So it is amazing that there’s so many authentic Dublin voices in this.”
Gilmore nods. “You can hear it when it’s spoken – it’s like music in the voices of people like Ericka [Roe]. In the first act, when she’s playing a tenement dweller from the 1800s, you can hear the music in [her dialogue] because of how naturally it fits in her register. Without that, I don’t know whether it would have landed.”
Getting to play an array of characters is part of the appeal for both Gilmore and McDonagh.
“Variety is what you chase in this job,” Gilmore says. “To get to have a go at playing a different character to what you might normally do, like playing little boys; things that just aren’t in your remit. So the variety is definitely a huge draw.”
Dublin Gothic’s big cast are on stage for the whole of the play, creating a challenge for its choreographer and movement director, Meadhbh Lyons. One aspect of her role was to ensure they accurately portrayed the different ways people moved in the different periods that the play depicts.
“If we go back to the 1880s, for example, there was a lot of illness during that time,” she says, explaining that it would have affected the way people walked. Jump ahead to the middle of the 20th century – the era of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid – and people might have felt physically restricted by the standards of behaviour that the Catholic Church expected of them.
By contrast, “when our lead character ends up becoming a dancer for a while, [a sense of] liberation and freedom came with that,” Lyons says.
Understanding how people moved also means “thinking about the clothes that the characters wear, like people in the 1880s wearing something like corsets and crinoline skirts, versus the 1980s, when we’re in Dublin at a battle of the bands, or in a gay club in New York.”
Bergin has been thinking about what she hopes will draw audiences to Dublin Gothic. “It’s a full evening’s entertainment,” she says. “And even though it’s epic, it’s not going to be an endurance test for people. I hope it feels like three little plays that knit together. It’s going to be a feast for the eyes.
“And my aim is always that it’s a truthful story. The most truthful thing about Dublin, I think, is its ability to laugh at itself. There’s humour there, even in the face of sadness and loss.”
The play, she says, aims to celebrate “the resilience and dignity of people, and that’s always, hopefully, a pleasure to witness collectively. That’s the thing with stories. Whether something’s sad or it’s joyous, just to sit there together and to watch it without feeling like you’re being sold something … for that reason alone, I think it’s worth watching.”
Dublin Gothic is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, January 31st, 2026
