• Atkins Hall
• Cork Midsummer Festival 

★★★★☆

This Cork Midsummer Festival event featuring author Doireann Ní Ghríofa is no ordinary book reading, with the location bringing the drama before a word has been uttered. 

The setting is a cavernous gothic ballroom, once part of the old asylum that is at the heart of Ní Ghríofa’s latest book, Said The Dead. The sprawling and imposing building, most recently known as Our Lady’s, is a forbidding place, staring down at the city from its lofty site on the Lee Road. It closed in the 1990s and while mainly converted into apartments, part of it still remains derelict. 

In Said The Dead, Ní Ghríofa gives voice to the women who were residents there more than a century ago, as well as the remarkable Dr Lucia Strangman, one of the first female medical graduates in Ireland and a psychiatrist at the hospital. 

It might seem strange to have a ballroom in an asylum but, as is conveyed in Ní Ghríofa’s book, there were many kindnesses shown to the patients, including ‘amusements’ where local players were brought in to perform. 

As the performance begins, elements of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, Patience, that was once performed there, waft over the audience from the balcony where Buckley and Ní Ghríofa are stationed, overlooking what would once have been the dance floor.

The pair have collaborated on numerous occasions, and the flow of that reciprocal muse is evident here. Ní Ghríofa is a magnetic presence and as she reads extracts from the book, charting her narrator’s initial encounters with the casebooks that bring the stories of the women to life, it is more of an incantation, hypnotic in its power. 

As one would expect from a pioneer in sound design, the accompaniment from Buckley, blending an electronic soundscape with flute and voice, considerably enhances the spectral dimension of the author’s work.

As I follow Ní Ghríofa’s suggestion, closing my eyes and letting my thoughts wander, it is hard to disagree with her assertion that the building itself is permeable, almost breathing around us as the audience is transported to some liminal space where the living and dead commune. 

A truly transporting experience.