I enjoyed Shadowplay, O'Connor's novel about Bram Stoker and Henry Irving, but Ghost Lights is even better. It"s an evocation of the affair between the dying genius of the Irish National Theatre, J M Synge, and his street urchin muse Molly Allgood, who starred, under her stage name Maire O'Neill, as Pegeen in his subversive masterwork Playboy of the Western World.
Forty-five years on from Synge's death and Molly is living alone in London, only her cat and the drink for company. Today, however, in late October 1952, she has a gig - an old admirer has booked her for a BBC radio play, and Molly has the entire day to ensure she gets there on time. As she walks through autumnal London she polishes her memories of better times, as a teenage actress in Dublin, of Synge and his eccentric courtship.
It is all beautifully done. The tragedy that strikes at the end is so masterfully handled that I was almost overwhelmed. Dublin, London and New York are all vibrantly conjured. I recognised the foyer of Old Broadcasting House; the same for Molly as it was for me a quarter-century later. It is only more recently that I have come to realise how important the Abbey Players and the Playboy were to the emergence of a radical arts theatre around the world. I think I read the Playboy for the first time around the time Joseph O'Connor was writing Ghost Light. What took me so long, I wonder? Don't know that I would have appreciated it properly had I been any younger. By God, I get it now - and I loved Ghost Light for reminding me.
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