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 ...

  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...