2012: YES! YES! YES!

Molly at Trades Hall

2012 YES, YES, YES!

MOLLY AT TRADES HALL

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Director Brenda Addie

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Multiple Mollies

Debra Low

Drew Tingwell

Uschi Felix

Suhasini Seelin

Jamaica Zuanetti

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Set

Kim Ritchie

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Lighting

Julia Knibbs

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Molly is the force of feminine nature that changed the lives of millions of women around the world.

Yes! Yes! Yes! was an opportunity to get acquainted with her in her ordinariness, her (almost) full acceptance of what it is to live in a woman’s body, her joie-de-vivre.

A Molly for the 21st century, Brenda Addie's Molly is any woman and Everywoman – an enigma to her husband, Leopold, the toast of Dublin, and a frustration to herself - full of joy and dread about her libidinous body. Brenda Addie’s production was joyful and celebratory, and radically different from other productions, taking Molly out of bed and into her glamorous past, her present with its dilemmas, and her uncertain future as a fading beauty.  And even imagining her in a male body.

Chapter 18 (referred to by its Homeric parallel as Penelope) is Joyce’s most accessible, and probably the best-loved chapter in Ulysses. Jung, who read Ulysses in order to treat Lucia Joyce, and ended up writing a book about Joyce and mining Ulysses for his work on archetypes, described it as ‘a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman. I didn’t.’ It is not at all bold to claim that Molly Bloom has inspired decades of readers and thinkers, and changed how we think about women.

Joyce astonishingly introduces a main character in the final chapter, though of course, readers glimpse her in Chapter 4 in her own right, and she haunts not only her husband’s imagination, but also that of other Dubliners. To meet her via her own pre-sleep thoughts is to see her in very intimate detail and from her own point of view. Joyce’s particular form of stream-of-consciousness not only gives us the woman’s uncensored thoughts, but also allows for his comedic critique.

Molly’s torrent of words (nearly 25,000, organised in eight breathless, unpunctuated sentences) ranges over her 36 years of life, and is quite unlike the chapter which precedes it, and indeed not like anything else in Ulysses. Time is a flux, the past sometimes more real and alive than her present. She is simultaneously her girlish self, her wifely and motherly self, and the crone she fears becoming. Joyce even sees her in mythic terms, as the ground of being, as the embodiment of fertility. Her thoughts are non-linear; they organise themselves associatively; they don’t identify to which of the lovers she refers; and they don’t tell a consecutive narrative.

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Translating this chapter into theatre is, as always with Joyce, a challenge. Finding the drama and tension in a bed-bound monologue takes one back to fundamentals: where and on what fronts is she in conflict with herself? What are the arcs of development that constitute the structure of the chapter? In developing the script, we’ve been moved by Molly’s fully realised female body and her sense of how it changes over time, and by how she negotiates her life-cycle. Molly knows both desire and its limits. Her body is not the only limit: she has to negotiate poverty, bourgeois respectability, and religious coercion. Her motivation to rebel and escape the prison of 7 Eccles Street is nothing short of heroic.