Live music Review: Nora Barnacle - National Concert Hall, Dublin

3/5

It’s a cliche to say that James Joyce would not have been the writer he was without Nora Barnacle. It’s also somewhat inaccurate, but his books would have been very different, that is certain.

His relationship with Nora became central to his artistic imagination. She is woven into his most famous passages: Gretta’s overhearing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ in The Dead, Molly’s soliloquy in Ulysses, the very cadences of Finnegans Wake. In a real sense, she put words in his mouth.

Now, the composer Shaun Davey and poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill have put words in Nora’s mouth in their song cycle, Nora Barnacle.

The immediate challenges that face this enterprise are to be true to the person Nora was, and to find a way into the heart of her intense, fiery and deeply erotic relationship with Joyce.

In one sense Davey and Ní Dhomhnaill succeed. You can well imagine Nora enjoying the music. It establishes a resolutely green-tinged motif to begin, which is more effective as it is revisited. And the accompaniment to the song ‘Nora in Paris’ is a passable evocation of chanson francaise.

The words, too, are like hers, plain and direct: “His nibs seems all right. Since I’ve made him / Give up the absinth.” But even if Nora would not have seemed remarkable in her own words, remarkable she was. A free spirit before she met Joyce. But nowhere in the cycle do we meet the girl who put her hand in Jim’s trousers on their first date. Instead, we meet Nora as type: The struggling Irish immigrant, the wronged woman, the put-upon housewife with the feckless husband. Really, she’s a bit of a drip.

The ‘dirty letters’ shared by Joyce and Nora are famous for their frankness. But this song cycle offers nothing as revealing or intense, only a series of postcards.