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”.
