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.