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The matter of unpublished manuscripts remains a grey area, and it was sad to see a superb digital edition of the Pola Notebooks, intended for digital distribution, not able to be sold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.

Big Maggie and Molly + Molly + Molly +

2012 seems to be the year of the BIG WOMEN.

The Bloomsday Players are currently hard at work getting Penelope onto a stage in a way that's never been seen, ever. I'm honour-bound not to give too much away.  The shock of the fresh and a new aesthetic take is important to our director, and for our patrons' enjoyment.  Brenda Addie selected her Mollies two months ago, and we've finally got to the end of sentence 8 just on Tuesday past, so a sense of the whole is forming. And it's rich and strange and, as usual with Joyce, surprisingly contemporary. Molly is us, still, now, here.

We made a commitment to get her out of bed, and that promise will be delivered, in spades. It's proving challenging, as Joyce always is, to stage. The language carries you a long, long way into the mysteries and contradictoriness - and lubriciousness, and vulgarity, and poetry - of Molly. It's always interesting to watch newcomers to Joyce respond to it, and this chapter is no exception. The ending is unfailingly popular with the romantics and the cynics alike (this writer can turn on a blade edge), but my attention has been caught by the actors' response to the human and vulnerable Molly, the one who consults gynaecologists and priests, but not with a lot of confidence that their 'expertise' is any better than her own. And the Molly who wrestles with every stage of her life-cycle, not able to let the past go, be content in the present, or face her future displacement by daughter or young screechers with equanimity. It's rich and nuanced material to work with, and Joyce invites taking risks, going over the top, and enjoying the agonistic.

Big Maggie, in J.B.Keane's play of the same name, is also larger than life, and coming off the page much more comedically than I originally expected. One thinks of Keane as a black comic and indeed he is, but this play is taking us deep into Irish social systems (which to some extent are replicated in other cultures too) and how they impact on women. And he locates his drama at a point in time, the late 1960s, when a lot of turmoil was being negotiated in western societies around the status of women in the law and in their families.  The play asks some heavy-hitting questions about maternity, and responsibilities to children, and answers them in unsentimental ways. Kids maybe have to be opportunists to survive, but mothers often have to be too. You will love or hate Maggie, and want to debate her values, and wonder what siding with her, or loathing her, tells you about yourself.

Wouldn't it be interesting to hear from those involved in performing the roles of the children how they respond to their fictional mother?

Seats are filling and spaces limited, so book soon for Big Maggie. Not possible to book for Bloomsday 2012 yet, but will notify readers when it is.