Melbourne's Molly ... from a patron's point of view

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 16^th 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!