Joyce’s Women, the opening production of the Dublin theatre festival, is an event. Edna O’Brien raises her arms to accept the enthusiastic applause of audience, actors and the president of the republic at Dublin’s Abbey theatre. O’Brien’s career is garlanded with prizes. Even so, this surely must be an especially sweet moment for the author whose first novel, The Country Girls, was banned in her native Ireland when it came out in 1960; it was even, as she remembers in a recent interview, “spoken against from the altar steps”.
The 91-year-old O’Brien’s latest play, her seventh (or eighth, if we include her 2011 adaptation of The Country Girls), takes as its subject a writer similarly reviled and then lauded: James Joyce. In a programme note, O’Brien describes the author of Ulysses as her “ultimate hero”. She has decided to show him, she writes, “as seen by the key figures in his life – mother, wife, mistress of a fleeting moment, his patron Harriet Weaver and his beloved daughter Lucia”.
O’Brien develops a dream-play structure that communicates a sense of interdependency between Joyce (Stephen Hogan) and each of the women. The bulk of the action centres on the hours after the surgery on Joyce’s duodenal ulcer, from which he will not recover. In a guest house in Zurich, his wife, Nora (Bríd Ní Neachtain), waits for news from the hospital. Past and present intersect, fact and fiction merge; the other women join her vigil.
The interactions are not always comfortable. Relations between Joyce, Nora and their daughter, Lucia (Genevieve Hulme-Beaman), are particularly complex. Joyce and Lucia dance joyously as she speaks words of Finnegans Wake he is yet to write. Meanwhile, in her Zurich present, a scowling Nora surveys this episode from their Paris past. With Nora, Lucia can be physically violent. There is pain here for all three. Lucia’s experiences of mental illness and her incarceration in an institute are shown in live action and in film projections; electric shock treatments are recalled in a monologue.
Conall Morrison’s production strives to render in performance the allusive and elusive qualities of Joyce’s language. The novelist’s variety of styles, tones and genres finds echo in the juxtaposition of disparate theatrical styles. A naturalistically presented room, with working treadle sewing machine, table, chairs and a stove that belches smoke, is set against an expressionist-style backdrop comprised of a patchwork of shiny, black sharp-edged panels (Sabine Dargent’s design, lit by Ben Ormerod). Songs quoted by Joyce in his fiction are threaded through the action, sung by a balladeer haunting the fringes of scenes (Bill Murphy, with his rich, round, resonant tones).
As in Joyce’s prose, perspectives and scales are distorted. Characters from the Circe episode in Ulysses, set in a Dublin brothel, appear as giant, back-projected shadows shimmering against a screen. When his “mistress of a fleeting moment”, Martha (Caitríona Ní Mhurchú), produces a cache of Joyce’s letters and reads them aloud, a snowstorm of letters swirls down from the flies. Lucia, the dancer manqué, once praised by Nijinsky, leaps into an immensity of night sky brilliant with stars.
Individually impressive as they are, these varied elements too often work against one another – the soaring black backdrop, for instance, overwhelms the naturalistic set and diminishes the characters. As a whole, the production falls short of its own admirably ambitious aims. In its parts, though, it offers breathtaking moments of vision and a bracing refusal to pin people to certainties.
