JOYCE HAD NO WORDS FOR MAMMY
Edna O’Brien puts the women in the bizarrely taciturn writer’s life centre stage – so much so, he barely gets a look in
Joyce’s Women
Abbey Theatre
U ntil Oct 15 ★★★★★
In Edna O’Brien’s new play, James Joyce’s long-suffering mother complains that he never has a word for her, and his wife Nora remarks that he never uses the word ‘love’ to her. Nora surmises that she was ‘the other side of Ireland’, the side that could supply him with uninhibited sexual experience. But more importantly, she provided him with the inspiration for the true love of his life – the manipulation of words like nobody else ever did.
The play, using many straight quotations from Joyce’s writing, has him lavishing praise on Nora as his creative muse, declaring that everything he wrote came from her, although she considers his writing too hi-falutin’ for her taste.
Bríd Ní Neachtain’s Nora is a much more down-to-earth character.
‘Lucia is the only one given space to express her personality in any depth’
There’s a large cast in the production, but it’s an uneasy combination of short dramatic sections with a lot of narrative biographical monologues.
Using Zozimus (Bill Murphy) the balladeer as a commentator on the era is a not totally successful in stringing it all together.
By far the most interesting character is Joyce’s daughter Lucia: she dominates every scene she’s in. There’s a long film sequence that shows the dramatic events that led to her ending up in an asylum for the rest of her life (although O’Brien releases her for a final session that includes all the major women in Joyce’s life).
Lucia is the only one who’s given space to express her personality in any depth. The play makes a strong case that Joyce loved her but was incapable of pacifying her.
As played by Genevieve Hulme Beaman, Lucia is a dazzling creation, a brilliant dancer and free spirit, bringing everything alive while exuding a sense of dangerous instability. Her life was destroyed by whatever personality disorder afflicted her from the time she was a young woman. Was her condition made worse by the family situation?
The play understandably never works out what exactly her problem was – the doctors couldn’t either. It shows her raging with what appears to be hatred for her mother Nora, possibly through jealousy. And her fate after one violent incident was to spend the rest of her life in an asylum (though O’Brien returns her to the family to attempt a more dramatic shape for later scenes).
There are fleeting roles for Ali White as Harriet Weaver, who gave Joyce considerable help as a patron, although her treatment by Joyce in the play is rather dismissive.
Joyce’s brother Stanislaus has a brief interlude criticising Nora and, in the final scenes, there’s an unlikely line-up of all the Joyce women, including Harriet Shaw and his mistress Martha (Caitríona Ní Mhurchù).
Because of the structure of the play there’s no place for the vitally important Sylvia Beach who took the courageous step of publishing Ulysses. Since this work is built around the women, Joyce himself is not well drawn, although Stephen Hogan does an impressive job of impersonating him physically. But the play does leave a sense of sadness over the fate of the women involved with him.
Edna O’Brien chose to concentrate on his women because she didn’t just want to add to the literature surrounding Joyce himself which must have been a disadvantage for someone who considers him her ‘ultimate hero’.