The 31st annual Bloomsday in Melbourne staged a play at St Martin’s Theatre in South Yarra exploring the encounter between Samuel Beckett and the Joyce family in 1920s Paris. Review by Philip Harvey
The
symbiotic relationship between an artist and their work is notorious in the
case of James Joyce. Himself, his family and friends make major character
appearances in his great fictions, albeit oblique, typified, parodied, and exaggerated
to serve the author’s purposes. Similarly, his family and acquaintances are
caught up in the creative act itself, for good or ill. This relationship, and
its real-life consequences, are the driver of this year’s Bloomsday in
Melbourne play, an informed drama about Joyce’s daughter Lucia (Mary Agnes
O’Loughlin) and the unknown young turk fresh from Dublin, Samuel Beckett
(Jeremy Harland).
Steve
Carey’s play employs varied modes to dramatize the conjunction between the
everyday and high art. A comic café dialogue between litterateurs using a
cornucopia of famous English quotes may be followed by a scarifying domestic
argument direct from the realist school, or a chaotic song-and-dance routine
that teeters on the verge of incoherence (read: madness). Carey takes a leaf
from Joyce’s book, it could be said, with this confident mixture of style
devices. For a brief while we find ourselves again inside the way Joyce
variously transposes the world in words.
With
the aid of Beckett, the audience steps into the secluded, highly protected world
of the Joyce family. Nora (Carissa McPherson) and Giorgio (Daniel Cook) must manage
a household determined by the unpredictable Lucia and her father, the aloof, kooky,
and imperious magus whose novel ‘Ulysses’ is now the sensation of twenties
Paris. The set designer (Silvia Shao) positions Joyce (Tref Gare) at a desk
elevated on a pedestal of hundreds of books and surrounded by a galaxy of depending
pages, the object of his perpetual creative gaze. This symbolism of power and
remoteness is the still point around which a great deal of energy and craziness
turns, most significantly from Lucia.
Attention
shifts regularly to the next drama in Lucia’s growth as a person seeking agency
and validation. O’Loughlin’s performance pushes the boundaries. Her instinctive
ambition to be a dancer, understandable in a city alive with modernist dance crazes,
gradually turns into a manifestation of Lucia’s selfhood, a cry for help, and a
test of her ability to meet the adult world. Her slinky, iridescent dance
costumes, superbly designed by Frida Moss, cut across the others’ conventional dress
sense, even that of the dandy Joyce. O’Loughlin meets the physical and verbal
demands of the central role with gusto, depicting a woman who at one level is
living in a world of her own while at the same time being extravagantly on
show.
Gare’s
Joyce tippy tiptoes through the fragile family relationships, Himself in a
world of his own. Bloomsday in Melbourne has seen all manner of stage portraits
of the artist. This year’s model must be simultaneously the literary lion in
his den, the wordsmith gone half-crazy with the materials of his trade, and yet
the responsible father who somehow understands his daughter, and her
difficulties, in ways no one else can. This balance between hauteur and profound
human sensitivity is ably achieved by the script and director Carl Whiteside’s timing
and placement of scenes.
But
it’s Beckett’s name’s in the play’s title, Beckett who is more or less the last
person standing. (Ironically or not, Lucia Joyce’s name is not in the title;
she is the rainbow girl, “fading out ... you can’t see her now.”) His
apprenticeship assisting Joyce with transcribing the tarantella of ‘Work in
Progress’ brings him into close proximity with Lucia. A fascination, a rapport,
a friendship develops between them that might be something more but is
nevertheless kept precarious. Harland plays the part with excellent formality, a
necessary foil to the lithe cavortings, both linguistic and terpsichorean, of
the wakeful Lucia. Carey’s close attention to biographical clues are the
turning points of the play, Beckett gifting her a pair of dancing shoes that
affirm her private ambitions while confirming the odd couple’s artistic
commitments. She is given power to move, but at what cost?
Yet
while Beckett’s encounter with Joyce teaches him he must follow a different
creative path to Joyce to achieve his purposes, the same cannot be said of
Lucia. Her parents’ exasperating inability to perceive Lucia’s inner creative drive
not only leads them to stop the dancing mania in its tracks, nor can they offer
a way forward for her pent-up energies of mind and body. We know Beckett will
go on to produce his tense, spare works in French and English; Lucia will go
into asylums. The concluding reprise of the opening scene has Beckett reconnecting
with his friend years later during visiting hours. They relive the motif of
dancing together, lucidity breaking through the miasma of weird crosstalk and
sleep, like a page of ‘Finnegans Wake’. There’s something going on, but what is
it? The play leaves us in a state of wistful, or perhaps that’s despairing,
uncertainty.
Charming
comic relief is brought to bear on this whole hothouse atmosphere in the form
of Tomasso Grigio (Paolo Bartolomei). Not a name you will find in an Ellmann
index, the colourful Grigio is an inspired hybrid of different literary types
in the Joyce world, seemingly written with the stylish Bartolomei in mind. Italian
was the language the Joyces spoke at home and Italian buoys up ‘Ulysses’, so
bella figura is both appropriate and welcome in a drama that is a downward
spiral towards Inferno. As Beckett’s counsellor and sidekick Bartolomei lifts
the tempo, lends perspective, while his performance as a psychoanalyst who
appeared to walk without aid of bone joints had to be seen to be believed.
Director
Carl Whiteside and playwright Steve Carey appreciate that Lucia’s story not
only has a lot of missing clues, it also lacks closure. The play engages with
the existing debate about this intrinsic factor in the Joyce saga, knowing that
many things remain conjectural. One theme of the play is how in death, as in
life, Lucia is being sidelined and misunderstood. The theatrical resolution is
to present a series of scenes, each one of which includes epiphanies (in the
Joycean sense of the word) but also necessarily conundrums. Beckett’s entry
into the Joyce inner world is the catalyst for a rich storyline, but one that quickly
becomes Chekhovian in its conflicting desires and unintended consequences, with
circumstances that are at once either ludicrously comic or painfully
disastrous, depending on how we see them. As a contribution to Joyce studies this
landmark play artfully leaves open the questions. As theatre, Whiteside and
Carey have created a fast-moving enactment of social disintegration, a dance
that bops till it drops.
Comments
Post a Comment