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Dublin Carol
A magical, compelling play from the author of The Weir.
Present day Dublin. Christmas Eve. Undertaker John Plunkett is sharing memories of funerals over the years and dispensing advice to his young assistant. But the arrival of his daughter Mary estranged, grown-up shows him the time has come to face up to his own disastrous past. Otherwise, he will never be able to create some kind of truce with his fear of the future.
'a theatrical spellbinder' - Daily Telegraph
'McPherson's short play is excellent: tough on love and the causes of love; profoundly sympathetic and damning about the denizens of the drunk tank.' - Time Out
91 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 28, 2000
About the author
Conor McPherson
59 books48 followersConor McPherson is an Irish playwright and director.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
December 6, 2024
سبک نوشتاری مکفرسن رو من خیلی میپسندم. اون جوری که استیصال آدمها رو نشون میده تو نحوهی دیالوگگوییها برای من یک درس نوشتاریه.
June 22, 2025
A gift for an actor, a strange little slip of a play.
September 15, 2024
Another quick-fire read to shamelessly get my Goodreads target on track for the end of the year, but a pleasant one at that.
My first experience with playwright Conor McPherson was seeing The Weir during Josie Rourke’s remounting of it with Brian Cox, Ardal O’Hanlon and Dervla Kirwan about a decade ago. The show was marketed with a heavy emphasis on its ghostly elements, which is a faintly misleading slant for a show predominantly about grief, loss and loneliness. Furthermore, having seen the blockbuster extravaganza Ghost Stories on the West End the previous year, you could say the horror-loving 17-year-old me was primed for disappointment. I came away admiring the performances, but frustrated at the lack of howling monsters or ghouls jumping out of the wings onto Brian Cox’s back. Slightly unfair criticisms in retrospect.
Two years ago I picked up both the scripts for The Weir and Shining City in a charity shop, and was blown away by what I’d missed as a teen. Both plays are masterful examples of dialogue-led storytelling, modern folklore translated to the quiet contemporary environment of bars and offices after dark. McPherson’s ghost stories are about why we tell ghost stories, the silent tragedies that make up day-to-day life.
I picked up Dublin Carol like the other two in the charity shop; but unlike them, there are no spectres here, only the little tragedies. It’s a more sedate work, and less powerful than his crowning jewels, but McPherson’s knack for Irish voices telling stories is still commanding. Inviting audiences to join an alcoholic undertaker on Christmas Eve, it brings questions about mortality, commitment and familial love into question all over a cup of tea and a few glasses of whisky.
“I’ll die if I don’t drink this,” says John, early in the play, pouring his booze for himself. It becomes apparent the play unfolds it has in fact had the opposite effect - he has managed to control the damage his drinking has done, but at the expense of seeing his family or having a life beyond this twilight existence working with the dead in a funeral home. “I just want to slip away, you know? Very quiet. Under cover of darkness,” he ruminates when talking of his own potential demise; alone, unremembered.
Split into three distinct dialogues, two between himself and a younger worker at the funeral home, and one with his estranged daughter, Mary, the play posits the question of what John will do when a tragedy gives him a tangible opportunity to reconnect with his family, even if it means facing up to the pain he caused too.
Like its Dickens-authored namesake, Dublin Carol’s predominant focus is on redemption, but with a more sober, bittersweet look at the cost that comes with it. Understated, it’s a quiet story that posits that the biggest acts of penance are the ones that go without ceremony and fanfare, done simply because it is the right thing. I did find it slightly weaker than McPherson’s other work, but then maybe that’s down to the muted nature of the absolution John has to go through.
My first experience with playwright Conor McPherson was seeing The Weir during Josie Rourke’s remounting of it with Brian Cox, Ardal O’Hanlon and Dervla Kirwan about a decade ago. The show was marketed with a heavy emphasis on its ghostly elements, which is a faintly misleading slant for a show predominantly about grief, loss and loneliness. Furthermore, having seen the blockbuster extravaganza Ghost Stories on the West End the previous year, you could say the horror-loving 17-year-old me was primed for disappointment. I came away admiring the performances, but frustrated at the lack of howling monsters or ghouls jumping out of the wings onto Brian Cox’s back. Slightly unfair criticisms in retrospect.
Two years ago I picked up both the scripts for The Weir and Shining City in a charity shop, and was blown away by what I’d missed as a teen. Both plays are masterful examples of dialogue-led storytelling, modern folklore translated to the quiet contemporary environment of bars and offices after dark. McPherson’s ghost stories are about why we tell ghost stories, the silent tragedies that make up day-to-day life.
I picked up Dublin Carol like the other two in the charity shop; but unlike them, there are no spectres here, only the little tragedies. It’s a more sedate work, and less powerful than his crowning jewels, but McPherson’s knack for Irish voices telling stories is still commanding. Inviting audiences to join an alcoholic undertaker on Christmas Eve, it brings questions about mortality, commitment and familial love into question all over a cup of tea and a few glasses of whisky.
“I’ll die if I don’t drink this,” says John, early in the play, pouring his booze for himself. It becomes apparent the play unfolds it has in fact had the opposite effect - he has managed to control the damage his drinking has done, but at the expense of seeing his family or having a life beyond this twilight existence working with the dead in a funeral home. “I just want to slip away, you know? Very quiet. Under cover of darkness,” he ruminates when talking of his own potential demise; alone, unremembered.
Split into three distinct dialogues, two between himself and a younger worker at the funeral home, and one with his estranged daughter, Mary, the play posits the question of what John will do when a tragedy gives him a tangible opportunity to reconnect with his family, even if it means facing up to the pain he caused too.
Like its Dickens-authored namesake, Dublin Carol’s predominant focus is on redemption, but with a more sober, bittersweet look at the cost that comes with it. Understated, it’s a quiet story that posits that the biggest acts of penance are the ones that go without ceremony and fanfare, done simply because it is the right thing. I did find it slightly weaker than McPherson’s other work, but then maybe that’s down to the muted nature of the absolution John has to go through.
July 26, 2025
This is the third play of McPherson's that I've read, and I'm starting to get the feeling that he's a playwright who likes his characters to tell rather than show. All the drama is wrapped up in the actors talking about occurrences from the past and, in John's case, making excuses for why they are the way they are in the present. How well this storytelling succeeds depends 100% on whether or not the audience sympathizes with the characters' histories.
June 2, 2021
Flawed, struggling characters here struggle for a modicum of redemption in this story of last chances. Conor McPherson's piercing dialogue and anguished confrontations are fully realized in this play of loneliness and self delusion.
October 5, 2019
Very powerful psychological study of alcoholism.
January 5, 2023
Não deste nada, Conor.
November 24, 2015
Scattered First Thoughts:
This is the third McPherson I've read (after Shining City and Port Authority), and while they differ notably in structure and genre, they're all preoccupied with guilt.
I had the intuition that there's something particularly Catholic about how McPherson figures guilt, and it got me thinking about the difference between guilt and regret.
The noun form of guilt (gylt meaning sin/crime) predates the verb, whereas with regret the inverse is true. Guilt seems to imply an external moral/legal standard, while regret is emotional, a pain caused by the immutability of the past.
(Maybe this distinction is obvious to a lot of people, but I definitely conflate feeling guilty with feeling regret.)
For Catholics, confessing your guilt is paramount and only through confession of guilt is redemption possible. So there's an association between guilt and redemption. By this logic, feeling guilty isn't merely a corrosive, obsessive force (like regret can be).
McPheron isn't Catholic as far as I can tell, but he asks a lapsed Catholic's questions: can guilt be a catalyst for personal change? What might secular redemption look like? Is it distinct from being forgiven? How?
McPherson's characters often seem to be enacting variants of confession (Port Authority is all monologues, Shining City deals with a therapist/patient relationship), and John in this play is exemplary of that. For McPherson's guilty parties, confession itself seems unequivocally positive, even if McPherson is ambivalent about the possibility of redemption.
This is the third McPherson I've read (after Shining City and Port Authority), and while they differ notably in structure and genre, they're all preoccupied with guilt.
I had the intuition that there's something particularly Catholic about how McPherson figures guilt, and it got me thinking about the difference between guilt and regret.
The noun form of guilt (gylt meaning sin/crime) predates the verb, whereas with regret the inverse is true. Guilt seems to imply an external moral/legal standard, while regret is emotional, a pain caused by the immutability of the past.
(Maybe this distinction is obvious to a lot of people, but I definitely conflate feeling guilty with feeling regret.)
For Catholics, confessing your guilt is paramount and only through confession of guilt is redemption possible. So there's an association between guilt and redemption. By this logic, feeling guilty isn't merely a corrosive, obsessive force (like regret can be).
McPheron isn't Catholic as far as I can tell, but he asks a lapsed Catholic's questions: can guilt be a catalyst for personal change? What might secular redemption look like? Is it distinct from being forgiven? How?
McPherson's characters often seem to be enacting variants of confession (Port Authority is all monologues, Shining City deals with a therapist/patient relationship), and John in this play is exemplary of that. For McPherson's guilty parties, confession itself seems unequivocally positive, even if McPherson is ambivalent about the possibility of redemption.
January 1, 2008
Not bad, but I sometimes have a problem with plays - both reading and watching - when all it is, is a few moments of people chatting, with nothing really happening. Well, my entire life is an example of people chatting with not much happening so I don't really need to go to the theatre/look between book covers for the same. SO THERE.
April 11, 2015
I found Conor McPherson's "Dublin Carol" to be a waste of time. It's a play, but even watching it I think I would've been bored. I didn't find the story or concept all that compelling. Perhaps the most masterful of actors could make the story interesting, but by itself it's not worth it.
March 8, 2009
Not my favorite, but a quick read with a troubled character with a missing wife... or is it a mistress...
August 8, 2013
As with 'The Weir", Dublin Carol is character driven and the characters reveal themselves slowly, just as you might get to know a good friend.
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January 9, 2019The next step after reading this was attending 'Girl from the North Country', same playwright. Aren't I a lucky one?
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews