Between the Lines: The Groucho Marx-James Joyce Letters

Bloomsday in Melbourne 2026

fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane, Melbourne

Review by Philip Harvey

Written for the July 2026 issue of Tinteán, a Magazine for Irish Australia

 

Google reports how a friend of Groucho Marx once discerned mention of the Marx Brothers in Finnegans Wake, albeit in the idiolect of wakese. Replying in a letter he seems honoured to be found in the novel, though is uncertain about James Joyce turning him into a verb. Elsewhere he writes. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t appear in Finnegans Wake. I’m certainly as bewildered about life as Joyce was.” This might look like the extent of the epistolary relationship, before dramatist Steve Carey conjured this year’s Bloomsday in Melbourne theatre work, a play founded on the discovery of a correspondence between the two men. The lures set up by such a cultural sensation drive the actions of the characters. 

Literally and thematically, the play is two-tiered. The stage’s upper tier exists in 1937. Groucho (Scott Middleton) and Joyce (Tref Gare) conduct a gentlemen’s armchair conversation consisting entirely of their sparkling to-and-fro of letters. Middleton has given considerable thought to Groucho’s cigar-pointing public persona, his verbal slapstick, and fretful energy. Gare, familiar with his part from previous Bloomsday productions, plays the author as someone maintaining a respectable aloofness while enduring all manner of private unhappiness. Both performances are disarmingly convincing and true to their respective types. Groucho is wacky and madcap oblique, a front for his own sharp intellect and sense of the absurd. Joyce is formal, Ciceronian even, yet sharing with Groucho deep ironies in lightsome sentences. The literary façade of both men gradually drops and we start meeting their private lives. One of the play’s gifts is imaginary dialogue, credible and touching, as social pretences make way for emotional realities. Middleton and Gare played the shifting tones well, making the words work their own magic.   

 The front of the stage, the lower tier, exists in 1987, fifty years later. Here we meet Pandora Friedan (Seon Williams), a name charged with historical feminist significances, and her mother Mary Friedan (Christina Costigan). Pandora is a Joyce scholar working on a thesis, though it emerges slowly that Mary earlier in her life was similarly one of those devotees. They conduct a parallel conversation in a changed world, one where Groucho’s sexist jokes meet dead air and Joyce himself is in danger of looking like a dead white male. It could be a parallel universe, not just a time warp. Pandora’s prospects of entering that other parallel universe, the University of Oxford, lead inexorably, in the terms of this psychodrama, to the collegial rooms of Murray Dalton (Shannon Woollard). Woollard plays with sinuous charm and Machiavellian ease the Joycean professor, up to his eyeballs in Dublin cross-references and ambitious to have all Joyce’s epistles see the light of day, with his (Dalton’s) name on the cover. Williams commands attention with her lively and enquiring role, learning as she goes the true nature of the gender inequalities of academic and literary politics. Her enthusiasm upon finding the James Joyce-Groucho Marx letters lifts expectations and the tenor of the play, while her sangfroid before the predictable abuses and betrayals of the egregious Dalton are the play’s moral centre of gravity. Costigan’s Mary, both victim and survivor of Academe from another time, carries secrets and must maintain a brittle exterior. It was a blessing to cast Costigan also as the razor-sharp BBC announcer Jill Snow, whose play of wits with the hapless Dalton live on-air serves as poetic justice for Mary’s own misfortunes.              

 

Director Renee Palmer grasps the various interconnections, time present and time past, turning them into contrasts, at times subtle, other times not. There is the nexus where creative worlds meet next generation academic and literary worlds, each dependent on the other. This leads to the nexus of interpretation, where one generation develops entirely new readings that supersede the established norm. There is the nexus of changing mores and tastes, Pandora uttering putdowns that would have been lost on someone in 1937. And there is the nexus of gender relations, amply amplified in this year’s Bloomsday Seminar, a constant theme Palmer accentuates to effect via gesture and voice. Scriptwriter Steve Carey is quoted as believing that “Joyce is our medicine”, and he enjoys using Joyce’s line about life being where we are “meeting ourselves”. In in his play we witness all the characters meeting themselves, by the end different from how we first met them.

 The two-tiered effect extends to lighting (Lindon Blakey), 1937 generally occurring in a soft interior light infusing nostalgic distance, while 1987 foregrounds a bright fluorescent intensity exposing secret truths. Costumes (Zach Dixon) and Sound (Inder Singh) likewise play with the time changes without ever becoming intrusive.

 Towering on both sides of the set are multitudes of unopened document boxes. This witty trope stands as a constant reminder throughout the 80-minute act of the hundreds of yet unopened letters and manuscripts the Pandoras of this world can still unleash, simply by lifting the lid. The set design (Ishan Vivekanantham) is a masterstroke of disclosure forever withheld. Even the uniform brown of the boxes belies the colourful and unmanageable contents an investigative academic can discover, only then to contest. A radiant discovery that the script is everywhere making us aware and, given the brilliance of the correspondents, the consequent contest for its possession.

 It is an apt reminder of one of the remaining Joyce scandals: there is no comprehensive collection of his letters. Only about half of the known correspondence is in print. Parallel universes, including Oxford, Antwerp, Tulsa, and Pomona today collaborate on plans for a digital project to publish them, cross-referenced with Joyce’s artistic creations. As Groucho once said: “There’s only two things you can start without a plan: a riot and a family, for everything else you need a plan.”   

 Paraprosdokian is not a word you see every day in a sentence and that’s a pity. Both Joyce and Groucho were cultivated exponents of the paraprosdokian, which is to say makers of sentences in which the latter part is surprising or unexpected in its phrasing, causing us to reconsider the first part. “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening,” declared Groucho once, “but this wasn’t it.” His signature flat chat delivery is caught well, zanily entertaining and combustive, but at times a bluff for his actual emotions. Such sentence turns are easy for Joyce as well. “I have all the money I will ever need,” he confides to his correspondent in the play, “as long as I die at 4 o’clock this afternoon.” Carey’s script revels in such wordplay, which continues in 1987 as the exchange of surprise endings shifts from the professor to his student in their dangerous game of co-editorship claims and counter-claims, with Pandora increasingly having the final word. This reviewer had a perfectly wonderful evening, let it be said, and recommends this highly original play to you, the reader. But it leaves me with a question.

 Bloomsday in Melbourne has left behind the city peregrinations of its heyday, settling into an annual scripted play for stage performance. Bloomsday’s longevity is due, in part, to its readiness to take imaginative risks and ask new questions about Joyce and his legacy. Sold-out shows, popular seminars, and convivial lunches are the reward for punters, patrons, and professors alike. Long may it thrive! 

 Roddy Doyle, Dublin novelist, in a recent Guardian interview, repeated his old joke about Ulysses needing an edit, while reminding us he’d read it twice. He addressed the Irish anxiety of influence by saying Joyce “doesn’t have copyright on the streets of Dublin.” But then drew the line somewhere, thinking “the whole academic world around Joyce is in some ways unfortunate. When there are books about Joyce scholarship, then it becomes just daft.” Goes with the territory, we could retort, depends how well you do daft (cf. Groucho), but this year’s show fits the description, being set in Los Angeles, Paris, Melbourne, and Oxford – anywhere but Dublin. How far can Bloomsday ever move away from Dublin? After all, Dublin may have been the “centre of paralysis” for Joyce, but it is also Joyce’s creative centre of gravity. This location question will always measure readers’ responses to his works, even if it drives them loco.