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.