READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

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 ...

  Anton Chekhov: 16 June 1904 Gregorian Calendar 29 June I just cannot get used to German silence and calm. One day is like any other day in Badenweiler.   There’s not a sign of good taste or talent anywhere. At 7 in the morning a band plays in the garden: they’re awful. But there’s loads of order and formality and honesty. Names: Doktor Formula, Frau und Fraulein Bassoon, Herr Lipp. My health has improved, not so much out of breath. Never submit a manuscript to two publishers at once. They might both publish at once, ignoring your protests. Out walking I don’t notice I’m ill, no aches and pains. My legs are thinner than ever they’ve been. Anyway, my play would seem to have been received well. At 7.30 a German visits, a kind of masseur. Herr Spa rubs me over with water, then I rest a while. Idea for a novella: all one man’s thoughts over course of one day. His thoughts about their thoughts and so on and so forth. At 8 I drink some acorn cocoa....

  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...

  The 31 st 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 co...

  One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   Like Martin Johnston, the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is concerned as much with the Bloomsday going on in his main character’s head, as in any objective account of the day’s actual activities. We reach page 214 of ‘Dublinesque’ before finding a description of a public reading of Ulysses happening in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar, Dublin. The novel is being read in sequence by a succession of politicians, celebrities, authors, academics, punters, and chancers, in much the same fashion as readings were made at Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne, going back at least to the 1980s. The main character, Samuel Riba, is a jaded publisher of ex...

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June. Email correspondence with Frances Devlin Glass (FDG) informed some of the discussion here. Some of her remarks are included in the paper.   The story of ‘South of Broad’ by Pat Conroy opens on 16 th of June 1969 in Charleston, South Carolina. It is the day the narrator, Leopold Bloom King, learns that his brother, Stephen Dedalus King, has inexplicably committed suicide. The reasons for this act are one of the dramatic threads that keep a tight hold on the reader for the next 20 years and 600 plus pages. Here is Leo, Leopold Bloom King’s apologia for his childhood:   Of all the elements of my childhood that rang a false note, I was the only kid in the ...

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   The opening line of ‘The Bloomsday Dead’, by Adrian McKinty is a coded message about a secret hotel location that reads “‘State LY Plum P. Buck Mulligan” and the last word of the novel is “Yes”, but everything in between bears no resemblance to ‘Ulysses’. The book is a “tangled and bloody odyssey through Dublin and Belfast … [a] well-paced edgy thriller” (McKinty Back cover) about a hitman called “the fucking unkillable Michael Forsythe”; it’s the finale of a series called The Dead Trilogy. In essence, Forsythe has come back to Ireland to help mobster boss Bridget Callaghan find her kidnapped daughter Siobhan, his modus operandi being to kill virtually everyon...

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   The theme of the death of the author is transfigured in Gill’s Peter McGarr detective mystery. The scholar, who is found dead from a knife wound in a laneway at the back of the Glasnevin Cemetery soon after June 16, is described as having an uncanny resemblance to the author himself, as though the best way to get over the anxiety of influence generated by Joyce is to kill off a lookalike of him. This scholar is about to launch a new Joyce study with the pretentious title ‘Phon/Antiphon’ (the slash denotes its academic provenance) and though a professor at TCD, he lives (or rather, lived) in a reconverted warehouse with his wife and nine children in the Liberti...

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   Martin Johnston’s novel ‘Cicada Gambit’ is probably the earliest work of fiction to use Bloomsday itself as an essential element of the story. Set in Sydney, it is an integral part of the history of Bloomsday celebration in Australia.   In brief, an academic Dr Skogg prepares for his annual solo Bloomsday. Skogg’s Dublin is Sydney and his literary celebration of the day is all in his head. He plays all the characters, something different from the social event as it has come to be known worldwide, where group sharing is a primary motive of the day’s festivities. He re-enacts a literary ritual of one. Possibly Skogg is friendless, with no one to share h...