Sneak Preview of A Stretch of the Imagination

Visit Bloomsday's forthcoming fundraiser on You Tube

www.youtube.com/embed/LWFHf_lLZ8s

Jack Hibberd's A Stretch of the Imagination pays homage to Joyce

Photograph by Bernard Peasley

Monk O'Neill (played by Wayne Pearn) is a reader of Joyce. 

Bloomsday in Melbourne

proudly presents

Jack Hibberd's iconic (Irish) Australian play

A Stretch of the Imagination

Two performances only

When: 19 November at 2.00pm for 2.30pm  and 5.00pm for 5.30pm 

Have a drink before the show!

Where: The Amphitheatre, 5 Courbrant Court, Mont Albert North.

come dressed for outdoors (jacket and hat, and hopefully not umbrella)

Easy reach of buses along Belmore Rd. 201, 302 (ask to be let down near Boondara St.)

Cost: $25. All proceeds to Bloomsday

BOOKINGS essential as space is strictly limited.

 A Stretch of the Imagination is the first offering of the Bloomsday season, a fundraiser with all proceeds supporting Bloomsday 2014.

The very gifted WAYNE PEARN (Hoy Polloy Theatre)  first played Monk O'Neill nearly two decades ago, and is embracing the virtuoso role again with unconcealed enthusiasm, relishing not having to whiten his hair and being able to draw on those extra dimensions of understanding that twenty years brings. It's a play very much about ageing and dying, though it's far from being sad or solemn. It is an over-the-top celebration of life itself, or at least of a certain kind of life - Monk is a recluse, a misanthrope, a would-be Don Juan, a misfit.

Wayne Pearn as Monk O'Neill                                    Director, Renee Huish, at the first rehearsal.

Photographs by Bernard Peasley     

Jack Hibberd's iconic (Irish) Australian play of the 70s is widely regarded as a masterpiece, and has attracted some of Australia's finest actors to the role: Peter Cummins and Max Gillies among them. It ranges broadly, and it dips its lid to Joyce quite explicitly but also implicitly. Monk is as richly a man who lives in his body as Leopold Bloom does. His fantasies may not be quite as florid, but the play does demand a certain stretching of credibility as one enters Monk's libidinal and fervid memories of women he's known, friends who have let him down, books he has enjoyed, opportunities to live the high life relived.  He may have started his career at Xavier and clearly is well-read if not well-educated, so the journey to One Tree Hill and his lonely is all the more intriguing. His is a body in the advanced stages of decay, and these are dealt with comically and graphically, and sometimes for maximum comic shock-value. He is the kind of man who rages against the failing of the light and who will not go gently into the pit.

Come early and enjoy a drink and a nibble, and enjoy a play in the open air. Please pray for good weather!

BOOKINGS essential as space is strictly limited.

or Phone Bob on 03 9898 2900

Joyce News from Melbourne

The Joyce world in Melbourne has been bopping since I last blogged. Very happy to report a fantastic Bloomsday with the very talented Wayne Pearn in charge of theatrical activities.  You'll be pleased to know that he is also a very fine actor, and we now have the rights to do Jack Hibberd's A Stretch of the Imagination,  a classic Irish-Australian  comedy, and a one-hander, and one of the finest plays to emerge from the Australian Performing Group from the glory days of the Pram Factory. Watch out for notices ahead of the middle of November. We plan to stage it in the amphitheatre at 5 Courbrant Court, Mont Albert North.

Bloomsday itself is more than geared up, with the first draft of next year's script almost completed. We have a few new hands on board on the script-writing team, and the plan is to bring you a short version of the whole of Ulysses. It's a very ambitious project and more about that as it unfolds. As you know, it's a very long and intricate novel, and we're committed to doing more with it than just dramatising its plot. We want Joyce's poetry to be full-frontal and bold, which is a bit of a challenge.  But it's proving fascinating to work on.

Bob and I just back from the Edinburgh Fringe, where we took in Dermot Bolger's adaptation of Ulysses in a bold new production by Tron Theatre Glasgow.  A fuller account of that experience (and an account of another Irish play) is to be found in the (free) online Irish Australian magazine, Tinteán  (why not subscribe to the magazine while you're there?). We loved it, and our few reservations will hopefully show in our own attempt to do something similar. Ulysses in 90 minutes is a big ask.

In Tinteán  too, you will find that there's a Joyce symposium happening on 3-6 October in Dunedin at the University of Otago.

The U3A group at Melbourne City has girded its loins for the third short course (8 weeks) this year on Joyce, what we're colloquially calling the 'Super-Advanced' class, focussing on the Stephen chapters. It has gathered up previous students from classes in 2011 and 2012, and it truly flies with what is very difficult material. Students are volunteering to give short presentations, which I think is a measure of their growing confidence with the material. The first four were terrific. We began with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and on Friday next we start where I quixotically advise students never to start on a first reading, with Ch.1 of Ulysses. One of the attendees lives in my house, and I'm hearing dark mutterings about how opaque it is. Let's hope the class opens it up for everyone.

Bloomsday will also offer its own Beginners' and Advanced Joyce course in February 2014. Please phone 03 98982900 or email our secretary Sian (sian.cartwright@mceecdya.edu.au) if you'd like to join the class.

Bloomsday thanks its web designers, Ben and Maireid of Lyrebird Media for revamping the website 3 years ago.  It's a very pleasing site which gives a lot of information and is easy to use and we're very grateful for their input. They have become busy with their business, and so Bloomsday is looking for assistance with website maintenance.  If you can help, please let us know (03 9898 2900). It's now our main way to reach our community and to draw new people, so Ben and Maireid will be much missed.

  

Colum McCann's tribute to Joyce

Colum McCann,  Irish-American novelist of distinction, has penned a superb tribute to Joyce in the Irish Times, 'The Home Place: Coming home'.

What Joyce would make of becoming a new form of communion ritual can only be imagined. What McCann has to say about his friend's intention and desire to read Ulysses  is moving, as is his way of sending off his friend.  Hope you enjoy it.

Thanks, Rita Crispin, for alerting me to it.

James Joyce's Voice

Simon McGuinness, Bloomsday's very first director, has alerted me to a piece in the Irish Times. It's an article about a recording made at Sylvia Beach's instigation in 1924 (and produced in 1926) to promote Ulysses. It struck me as particularly interesting because of the accent (mid-English Channel?), and also because of the power of the voice (I'm familiar with the older man's voice reading Finnegans Wake). This is a younger confident man. The dates are also interesting - the novel was still banned in US, and effectively then in UK. The passage chosen is quite tame, perhaps for that reason.

How is it that in the month before Bloomsday, these treasures seem to resurrect themselves to be auctioned?

Bloomsday has fond memories of writing Her Singtime Sung around a  missing letter of the raunchy correspondence between Nora and Joyce (inventing a fictional letter to fill the gap), only to have such a letter surface for auction at Sotheby's in 2004, and sell to an anonymous bidder for much more than the deluxe first edition. We felt our play was quite prescient!

Bloomsday in Melbourne festival begins on 12 June at fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne.

New York on Broadway

Daniel Pecoraro of Symphony Space, home of New York on Broadway,  recently sought, for the first time in their 32-year history, to partner with groups outside New York. He was keen to learn about Melbourne's history, and conducted a long interview. He was interested to discover why Bloomsday in Melbourne stages, rather than just reads Joyce.



Listen to interview by clicking here. 

Why turn Joyce's novel into theatre?

'I've a seeklet to sell thee', Kevin Dee (as James Joyce)
and Stephanie Lillis (as muse and daughter Lucia)

I was asked recently by an interviewer from Bloomsday on Broadway (congratulations to them on 32 years of Bloomsday readings), why we presented our Joyce as theatre, rather than as readings. It got me thinking.....

Bloomsday in Melbourne is, I think, unusual around the world in having been engaged in turning Joyce's text into theatre  for so long (20 years). It is proud to have created original plays and/or adaptations on an annual basis, mainly because it likes the challenge of coming at Joyce from a different angle.

It's certainly true that elsewhere in the world various sections of the novel have often received theatrical treatment, and Penelope comes to mind as a favourite of actors (usually female). Melbourne remembers with affection Fionnuala Flanagan's glorious and provocative strip-tease (ever so tasteful!) at the National, and Maggie Millar's bedbound Molly, and many, many of our own (Multiple Mollies, and especially male Mollies, take a bow!). What a gift to women actors (of all ages!) is the  dame from Eccles Street.  Circe also lends itself to drama, but it's generally select and doable bits, like the encounter between Bloom and Bella Cohen. Melbourne's more intensive engagement ratchetted it up many notches by seeking to deal with the phantasmagorical in the chapter (and not just the ghost), in 2010, takes a bit more doing and quite a lot of theatrical nous (Tinteán, issue 13, p.34).

Typically, Melbourne Bloomsday has taken two approaches to the material: it writes

1. An original play (this year's, The Seven Ages of Joyce, is a typical example; Her Singtime Sung is another) by taking a topic and writing our own material around Joyce's fiction. Such an approach allows us to ask probing questions of him.  How does the creative artist use the material to hand, in this year's case, his life, and transform it? What are the goads to creativity? What can one do artistically with intense suffering and emotions like jealousy and grief and guilt? And make living the ordinary life a celebration? Does the great writer have the right to cannibalise family and friends? Would this man have been bearable to live with?

or

2. A theatrical adaptation of a chapter or thematically linked passages from all over the novel.  This approach has the merit of leading deeply into Joyce's subject matter, but it presents its own challenges, as the chapters may or may not have a good shape for theatre.

Some chapters have their inbuilt climaxes and closure (Circe and Penelope), but many do not (Cyclops, Wandering Rocks) and theatre demands at least some journey, some discernible trajectory, and a climax, if it is to rise above simple readings. One wants to send the patron out of the theatre with some form of closure, something that Joyce frequently short-changes one on, with his equivocal and sometimes abrupt endings. We've done some chapters that on the face of it look unplayable: Ithaca (1999), Oxen of the Sun (2003), Cyclops (2011), and I think they have provided much artistic satisfaction for the scripting team. Solving the problems of how to end something that is not an end in itself is inevitably a portal of discovery. Sometimes actors have themselves come up with the outrageously inevitable (the end of Oxen comes to mind).

Sitting as I do alongside directors and actors, with a view to explicating the material and filling in the background, it's always fascinating to watch productions unfold like flowers in bud, feeling the heat of the sun, the rain and buffeting winds.  The same question always arises: how to make the material comprehensible to the Joyce virgin?  It's a mission Bloomsday in Melbourne has always embraced enthusiastically.

How does theatre help communicability of a dense literary text? The first and most obvious answer is giving breath to words creates meaning (what's not to understand in Penelope once one supplies the breath-stops?), and Ulysses is a triumphantly vernacular text, built as it is out of Joyce's memories of how Hiberno-English is spoken on the streets of Dublin. The music of the language is easy for actors to grasp, and although it may be unfamiliar, Melbourne Bloomsday usually use Irish accents, and mix Irish accents with others to tune up the ears of non-Irish actors, or, if necessary, invite in an accent coach. Beyond this, the language of gesture, lighting and blocking also add immeasurably to feeling states and meaning, and it cannot be ignored that Joyce often alludes to theatrical idioms of his day - vaudeville, and melodrama, in particular, and these modes are often resorted to to build climaxes. Lighting and makeup (whiteface) in particular helped contradistinguish the naturalistic in the brothel scene (Circe) from the phantasmagorical. This year, one of the many challenges is signalling a shift from the life of Joyce to his semi-autobiographical fiction based on the life. You'll have to wait to see how it's handled.

Perhaps the single most important meaning-making strategy is electing to play the text for its comedy.  Too often, I find, readers and viewers approach Joyce with too much solemnity (after all, it's a great work!) and reverence. It sometimes takes a few minutes for audiences to find that they are allowed to laugh;  in fact, being invited to laugh. A rule of thumb that the scripters have developed is this: if in workshopping scripts, we're not laughing our heads off, it's probably not communicating. So, the gestural language of comedy, often broad farce, is energising when bringing Joyce to the stage. A fine example of this would be the occasion when the Citizen (Jase Cavanagh) played his own poetic dog, Garryowen. The canine curse, following 'the metrical system and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn,'  was truly horrifying interrupted by howls and yelps - superb comic doggerel, and a splendid sideways characterisation of the hard-drinking,  anger-driven, victim-burdened Citizen.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of staging Joyce is the mercurial character of the writing.  He is the master of bathos, the quick and comically unexpected dive into the depths after reaching for exaltation, as for example happens at the end of Ch. 12, when Bloom, who has been implicitly compared to Elijah in his chariot. and Christ, in his dramatic escape at a 45° angle from Barney Kiernan's, suddenly plummets, 'like a shot off a shovel'.  When it's verbal, as in that example, the humour speaks for itself, but when the change has an emotional dimension or one wants to sit with a poignant moment, it can be disconcerting for an audience, which has to be quick-witted in the first place to appreciate the transformation of the moment, or be prepared to cut Joyce slack on the twists and sudden turns of his emotional roller-coaster.The transitions from high seriousness to low comedy and back again to the loftiest romanticism we found disconcerting when playing Molly last year. Emotional states are highly labile in Joyce - they provide opportunities, however.

I may not give too much away about this year's show, The Seven Ages of Joyce, but it's always interesting to watch actors new to Joyce slowly realise that they are dealing with sly and sometimes rambunctious comedy, bordering on farce. Bloomsday has a long tradition of not taking Joyce at his own valuation. The play we took to Dublin in 2004, Her Song be Sung, in having characters and figures from Joyce's real life round on him and take him to task, perhaps set the scene. In this year's play, Nora and Stanislaus don't have the last word, just as his quite cruel treatment of his own father is probably not the last word on that subject either, but Joyce's unwavering conviction about his own abilities (and aren't we pleased he was not deflected from his purpose), did take its toll, especially on Nora and Lucia, and probably Giorgio as well, not to mention Stanislaus and his mother. Some pretty passionate debates are happening among the actors about the characters they are playing. Currently, Lucia is pretty angry with Nora, and marvelling at the idea of possibly being a co-dependent co-creator of Finnegans Wake. One has to feel for the good-cop father (JJ) who is powerless to help, despite insistent strategising, and also for the mother (Nora) who is forced to be the disciplinarian in an era when a psychiatric label could be a death-sentence. The tussle between reality and desire in every life is one that Joyce knew well.

The Seven Ages of Joyce is structured around Jacques's (and ultimately Shakespeare's) designation of the seven stages of a man's life. Within that basic structure, which fits the life well (except for the fourth age when battle is with the censors and social conventions rather than warfare, though of course it deals with his flight to Zurich during WWI), we gave ourselves the liberty of moving between the life and the fiction.  Joyce's life was not nearly as orderly as his systematic, highly organised big baggy monsters of novels (we range at will over the poetry, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) and the contrast in itself between the life and the art is intriguing, especially when the real-life characters are free, in a non-naturalistic play, to interrogate the architect of the fiction.

To return to the question: why put Joyce's novels on the stage?  I hope because intelligent actors with a respect for Joyce's language and the astonishing perspicacity of his characterisation,  and direction which can help actors unpack that, really can cast more light on works that are not easy to grasp. That's my hope, at any rate. And that's what people tell us Bloomsday does for them.

Chookas to the actors and Director.  Great to see you playing with Joyce.