Edinburgh – Walking With Ghosts: this enthralling evening is one of Gabriel Byrne’s greatest achievements

Gabriel Byrne has been in heaps of major films, some of which (The Usual Suspects, Miller’s Crossing) look set to stand the test of time. Yet this relatively modest project, a small hillock of a solo show, in which the 72-year-old star surveys his life and career, deserves to be ranked as one of his greatest achievements, even if it’s the definition of evanescent.

“I know where the bodies are buried,” he has said of Hollywood. But this enthralling staging of his 2020 memoir is the model of discretion; the exhumation is of a personal nature, eschewing chat-show anecdotage.

As the title of both book and its theatrical spin-off attest, the Irishman – now resident in Maine – is after calmly guiding us into the misty realm of the past, not just his own boyhood in Dublin, but all the related places and faces that have headed into oblivion, rescuable in recollection only.

“I had this dream,” he begins, delicate in waistcoat and jacket amid three huge frames that are placed in a receding formation to suggest a hall of mirrors, a picturesque vista of cracked glass at the rear. In New York, the past seemed technicolour  – in Dublin, to which he hastens, the present is cold and grey; soulless malls and motorways have prevailed. So, fondly, he paints the Fifties and early Sixties, attempting – in a Proustian fashion – the impossible reclamation of vanished days.

In terms of celebrity “cameos”, the best comes early on: he got an involuntary benediction by the playwright Brendan Behan, who, swaying in drunkenness, saluted him as a nipper aboard a bus. With suggestive movement, and assisted by shifting lighting states, restless in their own way, he walks us down his memory lane, our imagination helping populate the stage.

He is candid about his family’s poverty, but there’s a simple richness to the character-filled days of yore – we get lovely vignettes of the fella who walked like he was treading on mattresses, or the gossiping am-dram actors who later took him in on as one of their own. He impersonates his infant self too, grin-gawping at the cinema-screen, rejuvenating in a fleeting instant.

He relives, with stabs of regret, his boyish shame at his mother counting out her last coins to buy his communion outfit – the department store episode one of several he has expanded for this outing. But there’s mirth too, as he goes on to confide the debacle of bodily embarrassment that overtook him after he gorged himself silly on sweets, only to soil those fancy clothes.

He’s funny, rueful – damaged; he passes briskly, albeit eloquently, through his distressing encounter with a seminary priest as a boarder in England, picturing anew the hands that drunkenly crept up his legs. He relives his own black-out bouts as an adult, winding up slumped like a tramp in a street doorway. Richard Burton features memorably, also a casualty of the hard-stuff, but a poet even in his cups. In Venice, he told Byrne that fame was like being trapped inside a box, with people hammering on it day and night; a coffin of celebrity.

Even greater stardom than Byrne possesses might sell the imminent West End run of this show for longer, but would he then have retained the humanity that now grants him rare wisdom and its lyrical expression? A soulful evening that finds numinous wonder amid accreted nuggets of existence.

Until Sun (eif.co.uk), then at the Apollo, London W1, Sep 6-17 (withghosts.co.uk)