An Opportunity for Australian writers?

The following appeal for participation in a worldwide event will no doubt resonate with local writers. 3am on 16  June is  12 noon here. Any (Irish?) writer who can cite an ISBN can respond to Irish Writers' Centre by phoning ( 0011 353 8721302) or email info@writerscentre.ie



                             Dear (Contact First Name),


                             The Irish Writers' Centre is celebrating
25 years since its founding with a world-beating public reading. Over
100 of our leading writers will participate in a marathon public
reading which will commence at 10.00 am on Friday June 15th and finish
at 2.00 pm on Saturday, June 16th - Bloomsday. If we succeed we will
wrest the Guinness World Record for such an event from the Berlin
International Literature Festival who managed to muster 75 writers. It
will be launched by the great Joycean, Senator David Norris and the
readers will include our Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney.


                             This extraordinary programme of readings
will continue for 28 hours continuously, and will be open to the
public. It will also be live-streamed - a webcam will transmit it to
the Internet so that it can be accessed around the world even as it
takes place in the Centre. We will be reading for the world in every
sense. Our record attempt will be monitored by the accountancy firm,
KPMG, and by the university, American College Dublin.



                             We can accommodate about five more
readings in the middle of the night, so if any writer would like to
participate and is happy to read at 3.00 or 4.00 am (when the American
Continent will be tuned in) let us know straight away - send the title
of your book that you would like to read from, and most importantly
the ISBN. Only authors reading from their own books are recognised by
Guinness World Records.:

 Help the IWC break a Guinness World Record!!



                             Dear (Contact First Name),


                             The Irish Writers' Centre is celebrating
25 years since its founding with a world-beating public reading. Over
100 of our leading writers will participate in a marathon public
reading which will commence at 10.00 am on Friday June 15th and finish
at 2.00 pm on Saturday, June 16th - Bloomsday. If we succeed we will
wrest the Guinness World Record for such an event from the Berlin
International Literature Festival who managed to muster 75 writers. It
will be launched by the great Joycean, Senator David Norris and the
readers will include our Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney.


                             This extraordinary programme of readings
will continue for 28 hours continuously, and will be open to the
public. It will also be live-streamed - a webcam will transmit it to
the Internet so that it can be accessed around the world even as it
takes place in the Centre. We will be reading for the world in every
sense. Our record attempt will be monitored by the accountancy firm,
KPMG, and by the university, American College Dublin.



                             We can accommodate about five more
readings in the middle of the night, so if any writer would like to
participate and is happy to read at 3.00 or 4.00 am (when the American
Continent will be tuned in) let us know straight away - send the title
of your book that you would like to read from, and most importantly
the ISBN. Only authors reading from their own books are recognised by
Guinness World Records.

(Thanks to Lily O'Shea and Philip Harvey for the alert).

Cross-gendering Molly?

Patrons of Bloomsday in Melbourne who have long memories will remember Gillian Hardy's 'Multiple Mollies' (2002): they were young and old, and male and female, and all shades of betwixt and between gender identities.  Ten years later, and much more Joyce under the collective belt and braces,  Yes, Yes, Yes! in 2012 is quite different in conception and execution.

When in 2010, we indulged Bloom's fantasy of becoming a 'new womanly man' in our theatrical adaptation of Circe, it seemed to the (male) actor involved (bless you, Jase Cavanagh!), a step very far, but being a courageous actor, he went there as Bella/Bello, resplendent in corset and camp-knickers, and so did Drew Tingwell as a snag Bloom. To want to be a mother, and even to produce ten metal children (which patrons will remember were tossed in all directions), doesn't seem so very odd to those of us who are mothers, but making that physical on a stage is still a potent source of comedy for an audience. I wonder would it be in a truly equal world? Joyce, we keep discovering, is often way out in front of contemporary thinking.

If a womanly man is a bit odd, the inverse is unexpected: a manly woman is almost commonplace. What a woman has to gain by acting in stereotypic male ways has always been known (blue stockings parading London in disguise in Shakespeare's day come to mind), and in the period when Joyce was writing, and about which he was writing, there were coming to light narratives of women effectively masquerading as men, and indeed not yielding their secret until after death (Johanna Jorgenson is a local Victorian example, and one thinks of other 'drovers' boys'), and there are even more spectacular examples to hand - like Isabelle Eberhardt who took shocking risks to pass as an Islamic man, as Si Mahmoud Essadi. Making Molly take initiatives in wooing is a simple example of her manliness; that it communicates as a rank form of manipulation might amount to critique of social values on Joyce's part, or suggest that under the skirts he puts on for Molly, there's some blokey pants. You'll need to decide for yourself.

Gender debates in the 1920s and 1930s were obsessed by the notion of androgyny, not just as a rare physical condition, but also as a social and identity orientation. You'll remember Virginia Woolf, Joyce's contemporary, in A Room of One's Own, finding it necessary to transcend gender, and espousing the view that great writers were essentially androgynous, able to draw both male and female experience. Some subsequent feminist theorists found the notion of androgyny worse than useless (more  'andro' than 'gyny'), though at least one of the 'holy trinity' of French feminists, Kristeva (a theorist who cut her critical teeth on Joyce), adopted a position that owed something to these earlier debates about the uses of androgyny for rethinking gender difference.

Drew Tingwell, a thought-provoking Molly.

The cat is accidentally out of the bag about one of Bloomsday's 2012 Mollies being a man. Why do it? What effect does it have on the ensemble of Mollies? The idea was our director's, Brenda Addie, and in part arose from wanting to create a continuity with the Circe episode in which Drew Tingwell played a soulful Bloom. Drew was a late addition to the lineup (joining the cast in April when another cast member had to retire from the production), and his very presence changed the dynamic quite significantly and in ways we find really energising. Molly is given to rants and slighting comments about men. Give these to a man playing a woman ... and a special frisson is created. It's not unlike what happens in Shakespeare's comedies when females masquerade as men, especially when we know that until women played female roles (well into c18), it was men who masqueraded as women playing men. It also has a remarkable effect in concentrating the mind on the pathologies of gender stereotyping (for both men and women), and the very real emancipation of stepping out of these constricting roles. It's a bit like unloosening one's stays and flinging them under the bed, something Molly loves to do, and something in which Bloom enjoys participating. When he gives himself a holiday from being a man, he comically enjoys feeling the 'crinkly! scrapy!' fine fabrics of Molly's underwear.

Let the transgendering proceed, in a spirit of enquiry and good humour. Joyce gives us plenty to enjoy and think about.

Getting Molly out of bed....

Melbournians will remember several grand Mollies: Fionnuala Flanagan in the buff at the Palais Theatre in St. Kilda was perhaps the most outré; but Maggie McInnes also comes to mind at various venues, notably La Mama, abed and savouring Joyce's language, as any reader/actor must. I don't think I've ever seen her out of bed.

And I've often seen her sanitised. Molly traverses a wide spectrum, from the romantic (the bits that are safe to use on radio and that make a warm and immediate appeal to the sentimentalist in all of us), but she's also coarse, vulgar, in-yer-face, not to say vindictive and punitive. We hope our Molly traverses the entire emotional gamut from A to Z. If this is to happen, then we as producers and adaptors of Joyce's script have to be prepared to enter a domain that is comedic, over-the-top, even absurdist. A zone where taste and censorship are likely to be in a state of tension. Can we as theatre practitioners go where Joyce takes us?  It's certainly a brazen invitation, and one that we've often taken up, sometimes against our better judgment.

It's much more challenging than you would think to put Molly on the stage. There are the problems everyone knows about: which he is at the forefront of her mind at any given utterance of a personal pronoun? Can one decide? Is that the point? Does it matter? Should one attempt to clarify whether it's Poldy or Blazes, or some other former lover that neither of them knows about? Does the novice need the history of her febrile sexuality? Is Molly's back-story enough?  Or is what is in focus simply her yearning, desiring self? And is that available to every person who chooses to engage with Molly?  Bloomsday in Melbourne is committed to making this novel communicate, resonate, generate laughter.

Then there's the other problem: is Molly the mature 33 year-old she admits to being (she's really 36), or is she the child-lover of Mulvey and Gardner, the young soldiers of the Gibraltar garrison? The Molly of the cliffs looking out across to Morocco, or of Howth Head with her eye on the Eye of Ireland? And how do those Mollies relate to the Molly who's just that afternoon bedded Blazes Boylan? How to mark these very different Mollies? The production that's been in development for several months now attempts to represent all these Mollies.

Or, to take another possibility, is Molly simultaneously the earth goddess herself, or even as some suggest, the Sovreignty of Ireland, and if so, how to represent that on a stage? We are impelled to try to do that.

Then, of course, there's her Homeric counterpart, Penelope, the wife abandoned by her adventurer husband, Odysseus, and who, in his absence, has to fend off lots of suitors (Bloom certainly labours under the belief that she is beloved by many) by concocting an absurd story about not making up her mind whom to accept until her tapestry is done, and then secretly every night undoing her weaving. Can we have her Penelopean self on the stage too?

Joyce's Molly is a huge canvass, an embarrassment of riches. There are several narrative lines, so we have had to select, and those with most pungency for our theatrical purposes have slowly consolidated around what Molly seeks in a man, how she chooses to live in her body and express her libido, and how that has changed over time. As always in performing Joyce, language has to be full-frontal and enjoyed. We hope to do her justice.

Big Maggie post-mortem

It's great to have enjoyed so much support from the Bloomsday community, and a wider range of people, many of them Irish. Bloomsday thanks you for this, and we would love some feedback on why the play was so important to so many people.

My sense is that the play was hitting a nerve, especially among the Irish. It left people in debate about how much room Maggie had to manoeuvre in given a highly restrictive set of social circumstances, if she was to survive at all. People gasped at how cruel and uncompromising she could be with her children and would-be lovers, and many could admire her grit and spirit.  It's especially remarkable as an artefact coming out of a pre-feminist era, and written by a man. We think being a publican might have helped his understanding of the women of his era. Interesting too to see how much men's talk about women has changed in the intervening 30 years.

So, thanks to Renee Huish and her remarkable and big team of actors. And especially to Deirdre who worked so hard to be the redoubtable Maggie Polpin.

A word from the Director of Big Maggie

I was delighted to be invited to direct “Big Maggie” because to me John B Keane is a real Irish playwright, inasmuch as he wrote on his home soil, about his own people, and in his own neighbourhood. 

When the profligate, feckless Walter Polpin dies without leaving a will, the family is thrown into turmoil. Due to having spent his lifetime playing his children off against each other, they each have expectations of how they will profit from his death.

So what of Maggie, the widow, whose legal rights in this situation are grim indeed? Or are they? With a reputation for 'fighting fire with fire', Maggie has foreseen this situation, and made plans, with some help from her old friend, Byrne. Maggie has never 'put all her eggs in one basket', and it pays off, at a price.

There is a cast of eleven in this play, or is it twelve!! And what a cast it is. It is a privilege to work with each and every one of them. So come and join us at the Celtic Club on the 27th or 29th of April, and experience a rollercoaster of emotions, as you change sides and allegiances with The Polpin Family, their neighbours, and would be suitors.


Renée Huish

Some exciting news about Joyce manuscripts

As some patrons will know, EU copyright laws have been much more restrictive than Australian ones in relation to Joyce. When Australian copyright law changed from the British system to the American one (from 50 years after the author's death to 70 years - to protect Disney), they were not retrospective, so we have enjoyed the freedom to perform Joyce since our inception. It became a problem when we performed in Dublin in 2004 and we had to do some rewriting of a play in order to conform with the copyright laws pertaining in Dublin.  The grandson was terrorising Joyceans by taking copyright infringers to court.  We made the necessary adjustments, and took our own little revenge, but were very happy to restore the Joyce in 2005 when we reprised Her Singtime Sung in Melbourne. Our Australianised Joyce was clever and witty, but Joyce is those things, and more benign than we could be in our 'translation'.


It's of great moment in the Joyce universe when the copyright formally came off on 1 Jan 2012, and we re-Joyce with our Dublin colleagues that they can have the freedoms we've revelled in for years. We are looking forward to seeing what will happen this year in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis.

The matter of unpublished manuscripts remains a grey area, and it was sad to see a superb digital edition of the Pola Notebooks, intended for digital distribution, not able to be sold or made available outside the National Library of Ireland when we visited in 2004 because of the legal situation.

I note with interest an article in today's Irish Times on this subject. Doubtless the legal scuffles will continue, but let's hope sanity prevails. Joyce belongs to the world, not just to his family and to publishers who have proven only too ready to cash in.

More courses on Ulysses

Bloomsday is planning to run another more advanced course on Joyce after Bloomsday. Possibly July or August. It will focus on the more experimental chapters and build on the understandings of the first course. Not quite sure of the format yet, and whether the 6 hour marathon is the best option. I love it, but it may not suit everyone.  I'm reminded by patrons that some participants come from interstate, so it would certainly suit them better to do the 6 hour option, or perhaps 2 x 3 hr sessions, rather than a more spread out format. Opinions hereby canvassed.

Meanwhile, for those junkies who can't get enough, I've elected to run a short course at U3A in Melbourne beginning on 20 April, so Friday week. It will be more relaxed, and be delivered in six 2-hour sessions on Fridays 2-4pm in the central city. I'm planning for it to be interactive and responsive to where readers are at with the novel, and I've not yet met the students or got their measure, so have not yet settled on absolute shape of the course. If you're eligible (a U3A member already), I understand there are a few places left. You can book by phoning 96395209. Bookings essential.

Re-Joycing again.