Joyce’s Women, Abbey Theatre review — Edna O’Brien’s play offers its heroines visceral freedom

Irish literary icon Edna O’Brien’s new play is called Joyce’s Women. But neither Molly Bloom nor Anna Livia Plurabelle make an appearance. Instead, Joyce’s mother May, wife Nora, patron Harriet Shaw Weaver and mistress Martha Fleischmann all feature. Yet they are left in the shade by his daughter Lucia, who spent most of her life in psychiatric hospitals after being diagnosed with schizophrenia in her mid-twenties.

In Genevieve Hulme Beaman’s versatile and engrossing portrayal, Lucia comes across as the most forceful personality within the Joyce family. Styling herself “the Isolde of Chapelizod” (in a nod to Finnegans Wake), she is not merely her father’s muse but also the primary inspiration for the dreamlike idiosyncratic language of his late writing. And her excursions into precisely executed geometric choreography point to immense unfulfilled promise as a dancer. After the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, O’Brien’s Lucia even manages to evade the Gestapo and join her parents in Zurich (whereas, in reality, despite her father’s frantic efforts, she languished in an asylum outside Paris throughout the second world war).

Such inventions suggest a desire to redeem the misery of Lucia’s life through drama — the one prose genre her father never truly mastered. Though we see her stab Nora with scissors, her behaviour mostly seems like a case of unjustly curbed exuberance rather than certifiable insanity. The author of The Country Girls invests her version of Lucia with plenty of speculation and fantasy. It is nonetheless easy to sympathise with O’Brien’s wish to endow her with the kind of visceral freedom experienced by Joyce’s heroines (as opposed to the real women in his life).

Joyce’s harried mother May (Deirdre Donnelly) sets the tone early on when she beseeches him: “Have you no word to throw at me?” Nora (Bríd Ní Neachtain) similarly complains that her husband has never told her he loves her. As played by Stephen Hogan, Joyce himself is stiff, befuddled and lacking in presence. He displays little trace of the single-minded determination that drove him to artistic greatness. That interpretation coheres with the play’s central premise that the writer derived his creative vitality from the neglected women around him. But the effect feels unbalanced and reduces his character to a cipher.

Conall Morrison’s 100-minute staging is similarly uneven. The scenes featuring Lucia brim with strange, effervescent energy that channels the modernist spirit of Joyce’s writing. Bill Murphy’s Zozimus, who sings ballads in the style of a Greek chorus, adds a note of tuneful mystery. And a late scene in which Joyce’s letters are scattered into the air playfully evokes the many controversies involving the writer’s correspondence. But much of the action unfolds in humdrum naturalist style and features too many overly declamatory monologues that seem better suited to the page than the stage. The play also includes a lengthy film sequence depicting Lucia’s confinement that is awkwardly detached from the underlying medium.

Joyce himself skilfully blended music, journalism and cinema into his writing. Joyce’s Women doesn’t entirely succeed on that front. Hulme Beaman’s charismatic central performance nonetheless constitutes an impressive theatrical achievement.

★★★☆☆

To October 15, abbeytheatre.ie