Staging Joyce ... a playwright reflects

Several patrons have sent me a link to an article  by Dermot Bolger (the Irish playwright) which appeared in the Irish Times last weekend. I responded warmly to the sinking feeling, the doubts and misgivings, that he reports about whether it's even possible to translate Ulysses into theatrical events.  

Having done it for 20 years, with a new script almost every year,  I don't think a single year has gone by without experiencing such doubts, quite radical doubts, sometimes until very late in the process. I've seen directors throw their hands in the air and have sleepless nights wondering how it could possibly work as a staged phenomenon.  

Molly - too long, fine as fiction, but rather tedious as a bedsteadfast monologue - so why not multiple Mollys?  Cyclops: too many disjunctions between the barflies and their brawls (the nasty strand of the chapter) and the interpellations (with their verbal exuberance), and can the merely verbal hold an audience's attention?  Perhaps the easiest chapter was Circe, but what about its metamorphosing phantasms, the mercurial, unprepared-for shifts in the narrative impulse, and the frankly apocalyptic cinematic elements (e.g., Dublin's burning!) and it's immensely quiet, non-verbal ending. Delicious.  The more naturalistic chapters perhaps don't have the right shape for theatre? Would I attempt the whole work?  You could, but you'd sacrifice a lot of the linguistic richness of the experimental chapters, and you'd have to have to find a compromise route through the maze of characters. It's challenging, alright. 

I'm interested in the solution Bolger found: to put Molly at the centre and to work through her memories, and I can see how this would work well for getting Bloom centre-stage, but it must short-change Stephen.  I really hope we get to see this production.

Maybe it's time to record some of the processes by which scripts come to being?

A pilgrimage ... of sorts

How Joyce would have hated the idea of himself as object or even subject of a pilgrimage.  More on this subject can be found at the newly (re-)launched as an online magazine, Tinteán.

Is Joyce a little advanced in years to be the young Berlitz teacher of ca 1908?  

Photo by Frances Devlin-Glass

It was Joyce and his important friendship with Svevo (thank you, John Gatt Rutter and his very informative Bloomsday 2012 lecture) which took spouse and self to Trieste.  Living in a sprawly Australian city where everyone seems to believe they need a quarter acre (including me), I loved it that one could walk the city from one end to the other and do it again.Trieste is a bit like Dublin in that respect.  We walked and walked. No need whatever for the splendid public transport.





Svevo is much-honoured in Trieste, with a Boulevarde, Museum (shared with Joyce), a b&b, and this dignified statue. Sorry about the cheesy antipodean.


A standoff between the Official Guides and the University of Trieste Joyceans meant that we did not get the guided tour by those with the cultural capital, though in fairness, the Triestine guide was terrific. We made do with the self-guided tour, and the Museum, which is very elegantly put together, with its superb curator and staff willing to chat and answer questions. There was much to inform in the memorabilia and letters on offer.  

The Svevo/Joyce museum was tucked away above the city library. A place of light and tranquility, its treasures included a splendid library of works mainly about Joyce. Of most interest to me were the postcards and letters Joyce wrote to Svevo. His postcard from Galway, long before the publication of Portrait, but while  publication  was in train, I found  hilarious: I don't think of the young Joyce as having intimations of mortality, and knowing the 'official' line on westcoast peasants (Ch.9, Ulysses), the notion of even a jocular identification is pleasantly confounding.

Caffe Pirona

The preferred sweet fix.

Caffe Pirona, with its huge portrait of Joyce and dossier of cuttings, beckoned. Good coffee. Excellent pastries. All the more enjoyable because we know for sure that JJ enjoyed them.  Tragic literary tourism, I confess, but there you go. 

 My knowledge of European history, alas! did not stretch to the complicated story of this small Hapsburg city and its fate during the time Joyce was associated with it, so it came as a bit of a surprise that it had been a hotbed of Italian irridentism, which got its reward after the first World War, when the former Hapsburg port became part of an expanded united Italy. One wonders what Joyce made of the liberation movement, given his ambivalence towards the Irish struggle in the same period. I take Cyclops to embody some of his postcolonial thinking, but also his horror of unfettered nationalism and violence in the thrall of nationalist claims. He was there in the last flowering of Hapsburg splendour, and there is much of that in this city that the 21st century has touched so lightly. The architecture is stunning whether one is wandering through the old city or the c18 refurbished one, and Mussolini's reconstruction of San Guisto and the old Roman remains at the top of the hill-fort, designed to build national pride in the town's Roman history, make for super serendipity  for walkers.

 

Not so far from Gibraltar and a bit like it?
A sculpture of  turn-of-the-c20 girls/women welcome sailors to Trieste's waterfront. Photo FDG.



As well as the sense that Trieste was a window onto a very cosmopolitan trading world for Joyce late in the first decade of the c20, the two big Orthodox churches, one Greek and one Serbian, offered glimpses into eastern Europe to the Joyces. Hapsburgian Trieste was a place of many languages. His friend Svevo failed to be noticed partly because he was writing in a lowly regarded Triestine dialect of Italian, until, that is, Joyce began to advocate for his friend's novels. The Orthodox cathedrals, both exceedingly richly adorned (I preferred the Serbian for its airiness and sense of light, but know Joyce loved the services at the Greek one on the waterfront), coexisted with Roman Catholic ones, and the Pope in this period even contemplated decamping from Rome in the hope of securing a more pious Austrian Catholic base. Again, I find it confounding that the arch-critic of Irish Catholicism could be reeled in by Greek ceremonial and Orthodox culture. One wonders what exactly drew him to it? How it seemed to him to differ from the Irish model of which he was so critical? Opera houses he could afford were also to be found there.  There were many ways in which Trieste transformed Joyce into a cosmopolite and a European. Being there helped me understand some of this. 

So, literary and cultural tourism may have its limitations, the chief of these being that one might be tempted to feel one knows more than fleeting acquaintance can really yield, but if it aids understanding and raises as many questions as it helps to resolve, perhaps it has a place in the scheme of things.  It's certainly as good a reason as many people can give for travelling.

Would love to hear from other Joyce tragics of their experience of Trieste.

Frances