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Showing posts from June 15, 2025

Circe’s Carnival of Vice BLOOMSDAY IN MELBOURNE 2025

  Photographs of the show by Jody Jane Stitt fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane, Melbourne Review by Philip Harvey   The nighttown episode of Ulysses, set in the red-light district of Dublin, invites the reader by every imaginable literary trick or treat to experience both the strange otherworld of the Hibernian Metropolis and the inexplicable creations of the individual unconscious. In his schema for the novel, James Joyce prescribed the creative technique ‘hallucination’ for this episode. Hallucination is an abiding form of character presentation (both animate and inanimate characters) throughout. It is also, in Flaubertian manner, an effect whereby Joyce would induce, seduce and influence the sensitive reader. But how do you make hallucination happen onstage?   One answer is in this year’s Bloomsday in Melbourne production. The collective obsession of the scriptwriters for this episode, the longest in the novel, has prompted all their best and worst instinc...