Philip Harvey has asked me to post this unsolicited review of the day. It's deliberately descriptive, so will fill in gaps for those of our followers not able to participate. I post it in its entirety and at the insistence of the writer. Eventually, it will get into the Bloomsday in Melbourne archive:
Yes, Yes, Yes!
Bloomsday
in Melbourne 2012
A
Positive Review by Philip Harvey
I
knew I had arrived at the right place, as the promotions advised, at the corner
of Swanston and Lygon Streets. Entering Trades Hall meant going again into the
parallel universe of Bloomsday, where everything can be happening at the same
time, the streets know your name, and consciousness has a living past in the
present. My print-out ticket was shown to Bob Glass and Sian Cartwright and I
was waved through.
This
year’s seminar was a special event for keen followers of the life of James
Joyce. The port city of Trieste was the site of the composition of most of
‘Ulysses’ and home also to the remarkable novelist Italo Svevo. Joyce and Svevo
developed a powerful friendship that was both social and literary. Bloomsday
was blessed to hear about this friendship from Svevo’s biographer, Emeritus
Professor John Gatt-Rutter, who has taught Italian Studies at La Trobe
University for many years. Svevo, the older man and a Jew, met the younger
Joyce, a questioning artist, on common ground. It was impossible not to hear in
their conversations the groundwork for Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom’s
encounter in the Ithaca episode. We heard about Svevo’s London business
connections, the exact nature of his Jewishness, and his death and resurrection
as a writer in his own lifetime, due in no small way to Joyce himself. Joyce’s
friendship with Svevo’s family is vital to our understanding of his work. Svevo
is plainly a main model for the journeying central character in ‘Ulysses’,
while Svevo’s wife, Anna Livia, is honoured by her name being used for the main
female character in ‘Finnegans Wake’. The professor’s richly informed and
sensitive paper was a gift to us all. Demands for a copy were expressed by many
Bloomsdayers.
Dinner
at our regular resort Café La Notte included a reading devised by James King
that was a foretaste of things to come in the main show. Entitled ‘Intercourse
Molly’, it was read by Silas James, understandably, between courses. By
selecting the passages in ‘Ulysses’ that indicate Bloom’s growing awareness
during the day that Molly is having it off with the tour manager, the
King-James Version revealed Poldy’s ambivalent and shifting emotions, between
jealousy and fascination, despair and complicity, fear and resignation,
nostalgia and hope.
In
the depths of hardship and isolation, the drive to overcome is powerful in both
Leopold and Molly. This is yet one way of reading the title of this year’s main
show, ‘Yes, Yes, Yes!’ Some years ago Bloomsday in Melbourne took the concept of Multiple Mollys for
theatrical purposes to outrageous lengths across the road from the Trades Hall.
This year the concept was refined and pressured into a most satisfactory
performance of the ultimate climactic episode. Five Mollys means five voices,
able to bring intonations and modulations and emphases of greatly developed
vocal effect. Five Mollys means five human figures, able to describe the
physicality of Molly in every state and mood. Five Mollys means any variety of
cultural references. Five Mollys means an eyeful of beauty and a head full of
how’s your father. Director Brenda Addie utilised these possibilities, with
results that were by turns comical, ironical, mesmerising, contradictory, or
filled round the edges with pathos.
Suspended,
or is that suspendered, from the ceiling were the usual props we associate with
the bedroom at 7 Eccles Street: lamps, bedposts, briefs, sheets, chamberpots,
fugitive advertising, a telltale letter. There was even a poster of Marilyn
Monroe reading the book in question, a contemporary replacement for the
voluptuous print on the Bloom’s bedroom wall. But it was as if these now
classic props of the Penelope episode had been more or less hung up in the air
as a set of quote marks for the action. “This bed thy centre is,” is how John
Donne famously describes the lovers’ universe, and Joyce knew the truth of this
line when he wrote about Molly Bloom. Joyceans are so acclimatised to the bed
as the fixed point of Molly’s turning world, it is a healthy to be reminded
that most of her monologue relates and relates to events, people, and places
outside the confines of her bedroom; also, through her whole life, not just on
the 16th of June 1904. How to dramatise this fact was the challenge
for the four scriptwriters, Sian Cartwright, Frances
Devlin-Glass, and Roslyn Hames, and the director, Brenda Addie. Their efforts were our reward.
It
was a pleasure to watch the Mollys striding about the stage, just as we know
she did in the streets of Dublin, talking and catching everyone’s attention.
This was no laid back Molly. Her fervent opinions about everything you can name
were spoken with the rapid tongues of real Dubliners. We were confronted with
someone who can stand and deliver. The day world of the streets, the markets
and institutions, was brought powerfully to the audience’s attention. And who
were these extraordinary Mollys?
Debra
Low played closest to what we think of as the voluble Dublin woman. God, did
she have a mouth on her! It was hard to remember what silence was once she
started one of her disquisitions on the perfections and imperfections of men,
the minxy mirror image of her daughter, or the miserable condition of her own
lot. The blogosphere has popularised the term ‘rant’. We may think Molly rants,
and that’s true enough sometimes, but her saving grace is the natural habit of
infinite digression. Indeed, any digression is likely to become the main topic
on her mind and we are left to catch up. Debra was able to shift up a gear
whenever the gradient required it. The sheer force of her presentation reminded
us that Molly is not someone to be messed with: she will always give as good as
she gets. Debra wore an Irish shawl, fan, full dress, and boots, again the
image of Molly closest in ‘authenticity’ to the novel.
Very
authentic but not typical of ‘Ulysses’ was Uschi Felix. Uschi wore a black hat,
black top and trousers, with red scarf, and seemed to have wandered onstage
from a cabaret. This was helped by her strong German accent and words from
Molly spoken in German. Not typical? In fact her presence reminded us of the
novel’s roots deep in Central European history. It also gave us time to ponder
Joyce’s debt to theatre traditions outside of Ireland. Sound textures and
multivalent multiple vocals could suddenly speed the listener in different
directions at once, hearing words from different parts of the stage, and
emphasising Molly’s fast-track mind. Uschi lent weight to these passages.
The
most unexpected of the five Mollys was Drew Tingwell, replete in corset,
bloomers, and boots. This confronting image of Molly as the new sensitive man
is actually in keeping with the shared masculine-feminine identity theorised by
Carl Jung and turned into conscious fiction by Joyce. Fascination with the
sexual experience of the other is another of Joyce’s interests, made all the
more compelling in this case by a male actor delivering a female’s lines about
that experience. One could not help think that the scriptwriters had
mischievous fun giving a man the lines about menstruation: this is what it
feels like, mate. Tingwell’s gender bender performance was completed by a
transformation into Leopold Bloom for the final scenes on Howth Head.
Suhasini
Seelin, dressed in traditional Indian sari and headwear, further extended the
cultural references of this play. Her disarming and wry expressiveness added to
the rich texture of the adaptation. Furthermore, by employing Indian dance
techniques Suhasini brought to the stage an extra theatrical language,
countering and questioning the classic blocking used in other sequences. The
overt Asian presence on stage was a reminder of the universal truth in Molly’s
monologue, of a shared knowledge of human experience across borders. Joyce
makes this abundantly clear by his inclusion of the Andalusian sequences in the
Penelope episode and the audience was reminded again of how easily Molly
translates.
Jamaica
Zuanetti is a character actor with great comic skills. Her Molly was in some
ways the most disconcerting of all, as she seemed to be directed to play
against the grain of our accumulated expectations about Molly. Molly in a
mini-skirt? Without being able to say exactly why, Jamaica was the most
contemporary of the Mollys, opaque and cool and knowing. Perhaps her turn as a
Marilyn Monroe Molly, complete with peroxide wig, is the clue. Joined for this
marvellous sequence by Suhasini, also in a similar incongruous hairpiece and
acting as a foil, Jamaica toyed with the ‘dumb blonde’ character, bringing out
hitherto unnoticed resonances with Molly’s own language games.
Needless
to say, the audience was treated to a feminist and multicultural reading of the
monologue. We heard probably more of the ‘Ulysses’ text than in any previous
rendering at Bloomsday in Melbourne. I was struck by how little of the
Gibraltar scenes were used and how much 1904 Dublin was brought to the
foreground. My guess is there was a reason for this, being the interest in
Molly as an heroic figure. Her dependence on others was downplayed in favour of
her independence of spirit. Independence of thought and action can have its own
trials, especially in a society where it is not condoned. The scriptwriters
seemed to go to great trouble to dramatise Molly’s challenges and how she rises
to them with a mixture of courage, stoicism, and humour. As well as being given
a riotously funny and exactingly moving show, Bloomsdayers went away with an
increased sense of Joyce’s reading of Molly’s bravery in the face of all the
hardships and absurdities that life threw her way. Thank you everyone for
another journey home to Ithaca, inside the safety of four theatre walls!
