Fifteen years in the making, Dublin Gothic is a uniquely Irish tale, an intergenerational story of glory and grime set in a Dublin 1 house. Having primarily worked as an actress and TV writer for many years, Barbara Bergin has fashioned a thrilling debut that highlights the lesser told stories of an inner city community over a hundred years of struggle.
Dublin is a city of ghosts and ghost stories. Perhaps all cities are. New York, London, Paris, Munich? We’ll get to that music reference, trust me. I need to give you a flavour of the thing first.
The ‘thing’ is Dublin Gothic, a panoramic theatrical telling of a story that is, and designedly so, a Dublin story and, indeed, an Irish story. The changing city itself is a character in this collection of interconnected tales, in as much as the characters are both in, but especially ‘of’, Celtic Gotham. Written by Barbara Bergin, (you’ll meet her in a minute, have patience) it’s the story of a house, ‘Our House’ really, over 100 and more years of history and hysteria, of changes and changelings, of politics and people. The people we meet aren’t the ‘movers and shakers’ (though some of those appear to greet us too) but ordinary ‘Dubs’ who, it turns out, are anything but.
We start out in ‘Tenement Dublin’ in the late 1800’s (as glamorous as you’d imagine) where a young girl, a child, let’s be real, is obliged to follow in the footsteps of her deceased ‘ma’ and “lift her skirts” in order to merely survive. Otherwise she’ll starve. A ‘Rackrent‘ landlord is present as well as a socialist tenant who fights a lost battle and the backdrop of revolution and World War is hinted at. In truth, such major world events don’t really affect the tenants of the house. They have much smaller fish to fry. (Though one gets executed!) There’s a dissolute writer in here as well, but sure aren’t they all?
Act Two moves us forward to a time when the exploitation of Empire has been replaced by the tyranny of theocracy. Changing times, or have they really? Other ideologies emerge, again, none of those particularly impacting our tenants, except in the way they most subtly do. And, the ghosts of persons past comment as they observe. They know things we don’t. Again, a ‘dodgy’ writer appears. (I wonder what writer Barbara Bergin has against writers? I’ll ask her in a while.)
Act Three and we’re acceptable in the ’80s, except we weren’t and our characters aren’t either. In an era when Dubliners were told we’d ‘never had it so good’, some of us, including Bergin’s characters, didn’t quite see it that way. People left in droves. Those that stayed had more modern issues to contend with as we find out. As did some who went away. It is in this final act that the complicated plot comes together. Times change, new challenges, but people don’t really. And neither do their stories.
Dubliners prevail. Having, to quote another playwright, (who is among a few nodded at by Bergin) “No other alternative”. We finish (spoiler alert) on an up-beat note. Even the ghosts seem to approve. There’s a ‘dodgy’ writer here too, but this one writes ‘pop songs’. Still questionable. His band is huge in the USA. Can’t imagine who he’s supposed to be.
Interested? Of course you are. Let’s meet Barbara Bergin.
“I’m Dublin, born and bred, raised in a multi-generational house of mainly women. Grandmother, mother, aunts, five sisters. I was never at all a ‘theatre kid’, actually I was quite shy. I left school at 16, mooched about a bit and then Trinity College Dublin inaugurated their drama course at the Samuel Beckett Centre and an aunt suggested I should apply. I did, I got it and I absolutely loved it. Acting as craft is sort of like a shy person’s revenge! It’s liberating. The characters I got to play weren’t a bit shy, y’know?”
Upon leaving college, Barbara joined the Co-Motion Theatre Company and tread the boards until television gave her agent a call.
“Yeah, Fair City offered me a small part and my agent advised me against it since if you take on a small role that means you can’t do a bigger one later. As it turned out, they expanded my character and I did four years on that show. You learn loads, like how to act to-camera but in the end I wanted to do something else. Of course at that time there weren’t a lot of opportunities for female actors on stage. I wasn’t the ‘pretty lead’ type and I wasn’t the ‘mammy’ type.
It was at this stage that I decided to write something I could be in. That was the genesis of Dublin Gothic but I thought of it then as a linear story for TV. I was given a bursary from the Irish Film Board to develop the idea and began to write closely with an editor. That led to writing gigs on TV for The Clinic, Love Is The Drug and On The Couch, so Dublin Gothic got put on the back burner.”
But it didn’t go away.
“No, it didn’t, the problem was in how to do it? I’d met director Caroline Byrne who had worked in London and at The Abbey and also designer Jamie Barton who both had ideas for it. I had the idea but they had the vision, really. Or maybe the other way around! I had written a set of stories and characters based around my city’s history. The soul of a city, maybe Dublin in particular, is defined by the unique way its people use language to tell stories. I lived in The Liberties for years and even compared to other areas in Dublin, that’s practically a vernacular! The people use words and phrases used nowhere else.”
The love of this vernacular is evident in Dublin Gothic. Bergin even makes up a few of her own. ‘Coddle Box’ (one’s ‘gob’), ‘Scutter Bucket’ (a chamber pot), ‘Gun Lickers’ (paramilitaries) and ‘Diddy Parlour’ (a maternity ward) aren’t actually real inner-city Dublin slang but they sound like they should be?
“Actually ‘Diddy Parlour’ is a real one but it doesn’t mean what you said.”
What’ s it effin’ well mean then?
“It’s a Dublin City Centre term for the separate ‘snug’ area in a lounge bar, where auld ones would drink milk stout. Honest!”
As funny as the play is, and it is, for those who know, there are darker avenues we’re taken down. Bergin’s prostitutes aren’t cheery bawds, her “singing priest” isn’t a nice fellow at all and references to historical figures like Pearse, Grace Gifford, Daniel O’Connell and others, though comic, hint at a certain weariness. She considers.
“I’d be careful of what you’d read into those characters, to be honest. I’m not making fun of genuinely heroic figures, it’s a bit deeper than that? Dubliners in particular and the Irish in general have a great ‘gra’ (love) for mythologising our heroes. We often don’t consider them as people, real people. We don’t afford them that humanity? And they were ordinary people, they just did extra-ordinary things. And of course there’s nothing the Irish like more than building people up and then knocking them down. Which can be fun? In a way, that’s the heart of the play. This isn’t a series of stories about winners, in the main, it’s a sort of ‘Loser’s History’, but they survive. I hope people pick up on the point you’ve raised, but I’m not knocking the character as it were, I’m knocking the deification of the character. Some I do take a dig at, no question.
Father Iggy is a monster of a character, the ‘Singing Priest’ we unquestionably adored for decades even as it turned out they were doing the most abominable things, but he’s not based on any specific person, do you see what I mean? It’s a jab at the system and the then prevailing silence and blindness around what everyone knew was going on but never dared talk about. Or was allowed to talk about! Father Iggy is actually one of the most lonely characters in the piece. On his own, and we see this, he has nothing, maybe not even his faith. Should we hate him or demonise him or should we feel sorry for him as a quintessentially “Hollow Man”. I know how I feel, but the audience will come to their own realisation. As a writer I can show you the character, but I don’t presume to tell you what you should think of them. That’s your business!”
Fair enough. So what has she got against writers? Since she is one. All the writers in Dublin Gothic are right eejits. Treacherous, faithless, talentless phuqs. (She may have a point, in fairness. Speaking as a writer myself…) She laughs.
“We’re back to talking about mythologising people again, aren’t we? Look, the character Vincent Meehan is not anyone we’ve ever heard of though some similarities to others might exist. My writers aren’t actually very good writers. I mean, titles like ‘Hunger’s Blouse’ and ‘Novelbook’ sort of hint at that, I hope. But they became lauded after they were dead. And not, in the main, lauded by genuine working class people, who, despite every past encouragement not to, do read books. It was elites who championed working class writers like Brendan Behan, though I’m not suggesting any similarity whatsoever, of course. And Behan had a real gift. My character doesn’t.
There’s a bigger consideration here. In Act Two, where I’m talking about the relationship between church and state, the concept of Imagination was actually and officially discouraged in Church controlled State schools. The attitude was, “We Will Tell You What To Think!” and a whole generation of people lived under the shadow of that dogma. And – I really hope this comes across in the final act of ‘Dublin Gothic’ – people accepted that, having no way to question it, but they didn’t pass that on to their kids? At least not always.
I remember an Ireland where you were not allowed to be gay, to practice family planning, to get divorced or The Boat To Liverpool. All that’s gone now and good riddance. And whatever attitudes made those changes happen, the people who enacted those changes didn’t lick it up off the stones, you know? I’m not saying that previous generations consciously instilled such so called liberalism, I’d call it humanism, but I’m saying that they recognised it when it arrived. Maybe even envied it? You’re getting once again to the heart of what this play is talking about, I think.
We are limited by the times we live in. In the 1850s you can’t fight landlords, (people tried) in the 1950’s you can’t fight the Church (people tried) and in the 1980’s you started to be able to voice concerns. And some of those concerns were addressed in a fashion and we’re here now. It’s not perfect. It never was. Nobody now can afford to live in City Centre Dublin like I did as a young student. They can’t live and explore and learn and be part of fast vanishing communities that I was embraced and entranced by. The city herself goes on of course, continues, changes. As do her people. That’s at the foundation of what Dublin Gothic is saying, don’t you think?”
I do, actually. A few things before we go? The Set. (It’s quite impressive…)
“I had no idea how they might do it, honestly. But, Director Caroline Byrne and Stage Designer Jamie Barton and I worked together to imagine the space for the stage. We needed a three storey house to tell three actual stories. The set is yet another character in the piece. Each level of three is its own stage but they’ve done it so that each one serves the characters. The attic room, the living area, the basement or street. And it changes depending on context? It’s a tenement house, an emigrant ship, a nightclub, a jailhouse execution chamber. Aedín Cosgrove on lights design deserves credit because her lighting actually changes the look of the spaces even within acts. I’m in awe of these people, that’s not my talent. Look, I’m good at what I do, I write plays, but these artists make it real. They have and execute ideas I couldn’t have ever imagined. I’m so grateful. And it’s funny because they have to consider how the actors, the cast, have to move around and about. Lots of ladders!”
The music?
“Oh good God I can’t play or sing to save my life! I can dance, or at least I think I can. However in telling a Dublin story or an Irish story you can’t ignore what music is to the culture and history. Giles Thomas came in and wrote the music to make that happen. We’re talking Victorian Music Hall to what the ‘Kick-Ettes’ dance to to what ‘The Angelus’ and the twins come up with later on. You can’t tell a Dublin story without music. You might as well try to tell it without tears or belly laughs? Funnily enough, at the point where my singing priest and baby-thief sings ‘Where’s Your Mama Gone’ I’m not sure people got the reference? It’s because he steals babies from unmarried and incarcerated mothers. There was big money in adoption, stolen children really, back then. Sorry. But there was. The mothers never saw a penny, obviously. Not that they’d want to have had. That’s never been properly addressed.”
What’s the experience been like for Barbara Bergin? Big Play at The National Theatre?
“Tiring, nervy, cranky, caring, careful of the cast and crew… In film or even TV it’s often hands off as ‘just’ the writer but with The Abbey you’re involved in every aspect of the production. Which is great and collaborative but very involving. I’m responsible. A lot of work and a lot of rehearsal. Tiny tweeks and gentle suggestion. None of this cast was even effin’ born in the periods we’re portraying on stage. And their Dublin isn’t mine, or it can’t be, that’s the whole point. But they’ve embraced it and inhabited it. I’m so proud of them. Actoring is hard! There’s hiccups and hi-jinks, early days, but I think Dublin Gothic works, I really do. It’ll settle. I’m proud of it. So proud of it, actually.”
Well, it did for this audience member, watching previews before it has been worked in. It’s complicated, but the crew and cast will jigsaw into the delicious complexity of it. (They pretty much mostly have…) It worked. Helps if you get all the references but you really don’t need to? I bloody well didn’t! It’s very clever but you don’t need to get every nuance. Three related stories well told. A story about a city I know and, mostly, love. (Bergin might well agree…)
At the close of our meeting, (she’ll take a glass of Guinness if pressed) I ask, ‘So what’s next?’
Barbara Bergin says, “Fucking sleep! Have you ever interviewed an actress before? I’m phuqing worn out! And I’m not even in the bloody thing! I’m just the writer!”
I really liked her and her play is worth seeing. It’s ambitious. It’s different. It works.
Words: Stephen Stone
Images: Ros Kavanagh and Johnny Savage
Dublin Gothic plays at The Abbey Theatre until the end of January 2026.
