PHOTO: Genevieve Hulme-Beaman as Lucia Joyce and Stephen Hogan as James Joyce in Edna O’Brien’s Joyce’s Women. Photograph: Ros Kavanagh
Edna O’Brien’s involvement with James Joyce began far earlier than her publication of James and Nora in 1981, and her subsequent biography about Joyce in 1999. According to O’Brien, it began while she was studying to be a pharmacist in Dublin and she obtained a copy of Introducing James Joyce, a selection of his work collected in 1942 with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. Long before she became aware of it, the influence of Joyce played a role in her life: from her “suffocating” childhood and education at the Convent of Mercy, to the realisation that her unhappy childhood home was much like that of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I might even say that Joyce’s influence upon O’Brien was felt from the very beginning, by merit of her being born Irish.
Written for the Ulysses centenary, O’Brien’s play Joyce’s Women premiered at the Abbey Theatre on the 22nd of September. Even the date for the play’s premiere follows a numerical pattern: 1922, 2022, 22/09/22. The title of the play suggests that it will give voice to the central women of James Joyce’s life, including Nora Barnacle, Lucia Joyce, Harriet Weaver, and potentially Sylvia Beach. Before reading anything about the play, it was not impossible to imagine a story about the women in Joyce’s work, such as Emily Sinico (“A Painful Case”), Mary Dedalus, or the infamous Molly Bloom. The possibilities were endless in the world of James Joyce, and in preparation for the viewing, I specifically did not do research about the production.
Anyone who says they understand Joyce’s work is a fool; furthermore, the joy in Joyce’s texts come from not understanding them. I claim no such thing about Joyce’s work, but in a modest effort to understand the world more clearly, I have spent the last few years studying him with nothing more than a cursory effort. In spite of this, my expectation for Joyce’s Women was invariably high, even without knowledge of O’Brien’s biographical work on Joyce. In this review, I should make it apparent that I will not comment on the historical accuracy of the play, but will discuss the play holistically as a work of fiction, since I am suspicious of interpreting it as a historically accurate work. Given her biographical work on the life of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, it should be safe to assume O’Brien has it all right.
Joyce’s Women ought to have been titled Joyce Framed by his Women instead. Structured through a sequence of moments leading from Joyce’s childhood to his death, the play uses the women in his life as a structural device, as opposed to being the centre upon which Joyce (Stephen Hogan) himself moves in the work, as I was inclined to expect. Before May Joyce (Deirdre Donnelly) enters the narrative, we already hear the character of Stanislaus (Patrick Moy) describe a scene from James’ childhood, in which he wrote playlets about the story of Adam and Eve. “Jim played the Devil,” says Stanislaus, as he turns and leaves the stage.
A redemption of this failed feminine centre occurs through the character of Lucia Joyce (Genevieve Hulme Beaman), who embodies the distorted legacy of her father’s artistic genius. Although parts of the play are structured through memories which Nora (Bríd Ní Neachtain) recounts to a seamstress named Brigitte (Hilda Fay), Lucia repeatedly returns to demand the attention of characters and audience alike through her arduous attempts to close the gap with her father and coexist with her mother. This latter endeavor proves impossible over the course of the play, but Lucia’s relationship with her father becomes a turning point of Joyce’s Women: a site of intoxicating closeness and biting betrayal.
My primary issue with Joyce’s Women is its attempts to justify the fate of Lucia Joyce, who suffered no shortage of miseries in her life starting with signs of mental illness at the age of twenty-three. I asked myself if O’Brien blamed the father for what happened to the daughter, perhaps one of the best kept secrets of the literary world. O’Brien capitalises on a study of Lucia being her father’s muse for Finnegans Wake, which appeared in Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003) by Carol Loeb Schloss. Joyce’s Women seems to suggest that Lucia was the true author of Finnegans Wake: with her father refracting her mental illness and unwell quibblings, as well as her obsession and talent for dance, into language.
Much of the play operates in the register of Finnegans Wake, making it understandable but not totally clear unless you have a familiarity with that text. You can imagine my relief when, after the performance, a person who worked at the Abbey Theatre offered me a print copy of Joyce’s Women for ten euros. Despite a few small reservations about O’Brien’s play, I certainly felt no remorse in buying a print copy, which sits proudly on my shelf alongside the plays of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge. Just as anyone would write about their hero, O’Brien places James Joyce close to her heart; so close, in fact, that he usurps the purpose of a play about the women in his life. Viewers of Joyce’s Women have to find the humour in it, because Joyce himself, as proven by the play, casts too large a shadow to ever escape.
