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2004: The Centenary of Bloomsday itself.
Bloomsday in Melbourne takes Joyce to Dublin.
In 2001, the James Joyce Centre Dublin invited Bloomsday in Melbourne
to participate in the ReJoyce Dublin 2004 Festival, the centenary
of the date on which James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is set. It
was the first international group to be invited and its offering
constituted the only full-scale and original work from outside Ireland
to be mounted.
With funding support from the Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade, The Bank of Ireland Asset Management (Melbourne and Dublin)
and the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Bloomsday presented
a full-length original play, Her Song be Sung, co-written by Roslyn
Hames and Frances Devlin-Glass with assistance from Di Silber. The
play drew on Joyce scholarship, feminist studies of Joyce’s
women characters and biographical studies of Joyce himself and two
women in his life, his patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver and publisher,
Sylvia Beach. Serendipitously, the play’s plot (first conceived
and written in 2001) entailed the invention of a missing letter
from the Nora Joyce/James Joyce correspondence. Just such a letter,
the first of the sequence (missing since 1909, and perhaps the most
speculated about literary letter of the twentieth century), astonishingly
turned up in Stanislaus Joyce’s papers for auction at Sotheby’s
auction on 8 July 2004, fetching a record price for an autographed
letter (Au$602,000).
Mounting the play was the high point of eleven years of theatricalisations
of and academic seminars on Joyce’s Ulysses for the Bloomsday
in Melbourne Inc. committee, and the achievement of a dream: to
take an offering to Bloomsday in Dublin. It was a risky venture
for several reasons. First, the play had to be radically rewritten
in January and February 2004 because of the threat of legal action
by Joyce’s grandson if a single word of Joyce was performed.
Joyce has been legally performed in Australia since 1991, and protection
previously afforded the James Joyce Centre was not forthcoming in
2004. The threat of injunctions dogged the festival, and required
emergency intervention by the Irish government to make manuscripts
purchased at huge public expense by the National Library of Ireland
available for viewing by the general and scholarly community. Secondly,
the venture involved four teams (totaling 7 actors, 5 musicians,
a theatre director and assistant director, two writers, as well
as various supporter personnel and Melbourne patrons) which rehearsed
separately in London, Dublin, Brisbane and Melbourne, and came together
for an intensive 9-day rehearsal period in 3 rehearsal spaces prior
to opening in the Sugar Club, a trendy cabaret venue in central
Dublin near Stephen’s Green. Thirdly, the group was operating
in a city and venue and under conditions that were unfamiliar, and
with very tight financial constraints. The writers, actors, theatre
director, set-builders and lighting technician (and provendors)
met the challenges.
Special thanks are due to the Loreto convent at 77 St. Stephen’s
Green who allowed Bloomsday the use of the convent for two rehearsals
and provided badly needed props: ‘You are welcome to everything
bar the altar’. Their support, moral, practical and caffeine-rich,
was invaluable.
The three-day season was well-attended (patrons turned away on opening
night) and well-received. It was the only original and full-scale
international offering in the festival, and unusual in constituting
a critique of Joyce. The Australian Embassy in Dublin hosted a reception
on the first night and the Ambassador and Irish Minister for the
Arts were among the distinguished guests.
Bloomsday was indeed fortunate to have assembled a very talented
team of theatre professionals. Gillian Hardy, the director worked
extremely hard with a fill-in cast in Melbourne for six weeks prior
to departure, and counseled the teams in Brisbane, Dublin and London
by email. Only two cast members, Deirdre Gillespie and leading lady
Laura O’Sullivan-Vines were available in Melbourne. Fill-in
readers who helped Laura and Deirdre shape their parts included
the subtle and generous thespian Geoff Keogh in the leading role,
and Di Silber, Nora Sheehan, Sian Tanner and Frances Devlin-Glass
in other and in minor roles. In London, producer and assistant director
Brian Hurley helped Simon McGuinness and Fizzy McInnes shape up
their roles for the very difficult and challenging Act III, entitled
Monstrosities. Simon is a charismatic actor, and Fizzy was huge
and intimidating in the role of modernized Bella Cohen. In Dublin,
the duo of Maria Blaney and Sarah Purcell from Estuary Players were
a gift to a touring group as they themselves had toured often in
America. In addition to performing with gusto and accuracy their
roles, Maria made a new wedding dress for the bride, and a stage
for the Tatty Tenors and Diva, both big jobs done overnight. They
also knew the best places to party. Deirdre Gillespie and Margaret
Doyle became a wonderful comic team as they milked the differences
between Sylvia Beach and Harriet Shaw Weaver and gave Joyce a serve
for some misogynistic moves. The script takes on Joyce’s women
in a questioning way, though with affection for some of his characterizations.
The Tatty Tenors and Diva lifted the performance with their professionally
delivered Joycean and other repertoire, making fun musically of
the romantic pretensions of some of the bride’s life scripts
and underlining the comedy of the script. Their ‘Ballad of
Joking Jesus’ and ‘Go Lassie, Go’ exactly pin-pointed
the writers’ critique of Joyce, and highlighted how women’s
life-scripts (in Australia at any rate) have changed over 82 years
since the publication of Ulysses. The Tatties also performed an
Australian repertoire of songs each night after the show.
Helen Monaghan, the Director of the James Joyce Centre, Dublin,
expressed her thanks to Bloomsday in Melbourne thus:
In the midst of the madness of the festival I did not
get a proper opportunity to express my (and the Centre's) appreciation
and admiration of the incredible achievement of Bloomsday in Melbourne
- to bring your show to the other side of the globe took more than
its fair share of blood, sweat and tears I reckon. A cast and crew
spread over 4 locations between Europe and Australia, a first-time
tour, the late rewrite and tight budget - could have been a recipe
for disaster but you all pulled it off and should be proud of yourselves!
Personally
I enjoyed the show very much - I enjoyed the characterisations and
found the dialogue very amusing, especially the side-swipe at a
certain relative of mine in Paris. Ken [Monaghan, nephew of James
Joyce] also enjoyed that - and indeed the entire performance. I
also spoke to Melanie [Scaife] in the Embassy who said that all
of their guests enjoyed themselves, so only positive feedback for
you! (7 July 2004)
The Australian
Embassy (via Melanie Scaife) in Dublin reported formally in the
following terms:
on the [opening]
night reaction from our contacts was varied, reflecting no doubt
the diversity of the audience - some greatly enjoyed the play,
others were bemused and/or confused by the Australian humour,
and again others enjoyed the feminist take on Ulysses. Irrespective
of whether reactions were positive or critical , the play inspired
animated debate.
Meg McNena,
reviewing the play in TÁIN, The Irish-Australian Network
(no. 32, August/Sep. 2004), wrote:
Timing and chemistry on stage shoed no signs that the
ensemble had only gathered in Dublin on June 7. Groups had rehearsed
in Melbourne, London, Dublin and Brisbane. Bravo to international
relations, the talents of director Gillian Hardy and a skilled team.
I grinned proudly at a box labeled Australiana in the bookshop set.
Music-hall operatics of Brisbane’s The Tatty Tenor (Ralph
Devlin, Ron Jackson, Jim Ahern) and soprano, Sharon Moore, lifted
the audience to another time and place. The play is fast-paced,
entertaining and informative. …It was an industrious, crafted
and engaging show with energetic performances and a tight script….
The
event attracted extensive coverage in the Australian press –
two articles by Fiona Scott-Norman and Andra Jackson for The
Age, a piece by Patricia Kelly in the Brisbane Courier
Mail, and another by Tony Barry in The Herald Sun.
In Dublin Melbourne’s offering was a featured billing in James
Joyce Bloomsday 2004, the official annual publication of the
James Joyce Centre.
The ReJoyce Dublin 2004 Festival also sponsored a 1000-delegate
strong Symposium
for the International James Joyce Foundation, and Frances Devlin-Glass
offered a paper based on empirical research into the extent to which
and motives for which Joyce’s fiction is read by members of
the Bloomsday in Melbourne community.
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