BROADWAY REVIEW: In moving ‘Walking with Ghosts,’ Irish actor Gabriel Byrne confronts shadows of his own troubled past

It’s both a truism and an abiding human truth that when we reach a certain age we lose our personal ambition and our desire to change the world. Instead, we yearn for the return of our youth and, most particularly, the loved ones we likely have lost along the way. This is why young and old so rarely understand each other.

Men of tight-knit, working-class origin, I think, are particularly susceptible to this longing: It suffuses Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeous 2021 movie “Belfast” and it underpins the 73-year-old Gabriel Byrne’s solo show, which opened on Broadway Thursday night at the Music Box Theatre.

In “Walking with Ghosts,” which is drawn from Byrne’s 2020 memoir, the Irish-born actor, his visage wracked with the pain — and, to a lesser extent, the joy — of lifelong memories, peels back his 1950s and 1960s youth as the son of a Guinness barrel maker.

Initially, it’s all so conventional as to be cliched: First Communion, the guilt at the excitement of seeing a girl’s knickers, dancing on a father’s knee, the joys of a fun fair, heading into a Dublin hotel for tea with a dressed-up mother, anxious to escape domestic drudgery.

Byrne’s parents are dead now and he talks lovingly and movingly of them, musing on how his self-involved self likely failed to see their own longings, as do almost all kids, until it’s too late. And then there is the start of his own acting career — how those early years in a colorful theatrical repertory company, shagging actresses on creaking beds, eclipsed for sheer joy any kind of cinematic stardom that might have followed.

This kind of stuff you can of course read in a hundred actors’ memoirs. Thespians as a brood tend to be especially bemused at their own mortality, and at how the fame they craved for so long can come to matter so little.

But before long, Byrne takes us to England and seminary and an abusive Christian brother; one of many in this piece. He moves on to memories of his late sister, a devastating loss, and her struggles with mental health. And, of course, being imbued with the twin susceptibilities of being both Irish and an actor, he tackles the booze.

It starts with the fun of drinking Jameson’s with Richard Burton in a Venice hotel but you already know that the piper will have to be paid.

“Walking with Ghosts,” directed by Lonny Price, has some quirks. It’s only loosely staged with minimal visual accoutrements and it hews too closely to the memoir. The piece, which could use more narrative drive for a two-act night of theater, unfolds, chapter-like, on the stage. Some of the transitions are abrupt. And the mix of theme and chronology sometimes feels better suited to the page than the stage.

But only a fool could not see that this is a deeply honest and courageous work from an actor digging deep into what now matters to him, a self-probing of uncommon intensity that never comes off as overly egotistical or glib.

Its appeal lies in its universality, of course, which perhaps explains why Byrne (unlike, say, Elaine Stritch and Bruce Springsteen) never really confronts the undeniable elephant in the room: That he only gets to do this now on a Broadway stage because of the very celebrity that he has now come to see as less meaningful to him than the love of his family.

What of the plumbers and heating specialists who did not find a way out through amateur dramatics? What does Byrne feel about them, one wonders? What does he think about his own lucky escape to ... where? We never really know that answer. In the show, in fact, Byrne tries his best to avoid using his own name and he spends no time at all on the peak of his own career. I suspect he worried that would comes across as arrogant, and likely he was right.

Fans of this fine, deeply vulnerable actor won’t worry much about any of this, of course. And everyone else gets to spend time, at least, with a man who has a clear capacity to love. As you do so, if you’re of a certain age, you’ll track back through your own experience as sure as a Guinness is a stout.