The character of James Joyce

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Theatrical performances celebrating our greatest writer centre on Travesties, a play about the man himself, says Alan O’Riordan

SINCE the turn of the year, the works of James Joyce have moved out of copyright, and out of the control of arguably the most notoriously exacting of all literary estates.

Rough Magic Theatre Company are marking this new era with Joyce in June, a week of interviews, performances, and lectures centred around a new production at Dun Laoghaire’s Pavilion Theatre. Yet, despite performances never permitted before (musical interpretations, stage adaptations, and so on), the main event of the week is not by Joyce, who wrote one play, Exiles. Lynne Parker is directing a play with Joyce in it: Travesties, by Tom Stoppard.

Exiles is problematic, but there will be a rehearsed reading of the play during the week.

Parker says: “Last year, we started a relationship with the Pavilion, when we did Plaza Suite. It went very well and we thought we should follow up on that. I had the notion of doing Travesties, because I’d done it when I was at college and I’d always had a great affection for it. I knew it was a very fun show, and we’d considered it even before we decided to do Plaza Suite. So, in a way, we thought of the play before we’d made the association with this particular year and it happens to chime rather beautifully.”

Stoppard’s play takes place in Zurich in 1917, when the city was a crossroads in war-torn Europe, and a metaphorical crossroads of the 20th century: Joyce was there, busy reinventing the novel; Tristram Tsara, the Dadaist, was busy re-inventing old artistic assumptions, in his poems and manifestos; and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was soon to be busy reinventing Russia. For most playwrights, the mix of those personalities and ideas would be enough. Stoppard, though, filters the scene through one of Zurich’s minor characters, Henry Carr, a British consular official who performed in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest that was staged by Joyce, but sued him over a pair of trousers and threatened, according to Joyce in court, to “wring his neck”.

Joyce immortalised Carr as Private Carr, who attacks Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, saying: “I’ll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.”

Stoppard’s Carr is not such a crude caricature. He is an old man, reminiscing about Zurich and the people he knew there. Stoppard, through Carr, sends up Joyce’s contradictions (he’s “an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognised”), uses him as a cornerstone of the play’s ideas about the role of the artist (Joyce was not short on those) and prompting us to consider the man behind the genius.

But Travesties is also, Parker says, “a romp, with an enormous sense of mischief in it”. With such a heady brew, she says, “the challenge is to negotiate your way effortlessly through all those switches. You don’t have to bring inventiveness to it, you have to bring discipline. Stoppard’s done the theatricality, the wit, the cleverness. You actually have to serve that in a very disciplined way, which is almost an unusual way to work. Normally, the actors are asked to bring in so much theatricality and inventiveness of their own. With this, the trick is not to pile too much extra on top of that.”

Parker is talking in the rehearsal room of the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity College. A short distance away, this writer first came across Travesties: in the college library. The play felt at home there, in the company of books, with its whirl of ideas, its relentless inter-textuality. While a spoonful of farce helps the ideas go down, is there a danger people might be put off by the intellectual games? “I tend to use my parents as a guide a lot,” says Parker. “They are not literary people in any way, and if they can enjoy this, then I feel I’ve done my job. Obviously, the more you know the more you’ll enjoy. But it’s a bit like Improbable Frequency [Arthur Riordan’s musical about Emergency-years Dublin]. You can get a great sense of fun out of it. Even if you don’t know who Myles na gCopaleen or Schrodinger are, or any of them, you can still get the sense of the show, because the show explains itself.

“Travesties absolutely explains itself, in enormous detail, and as long as we can get the detail clear, then the audience have all they need to enjoy the show.”

* Travesties is at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, 8pm, Jun 7-23. Box office: 01-2312929/ paviliontheatre.ie. For the Joyce in June programme, see roughmagic.ie. Home