Script

 

In the past year I have worked on the script committee for Bloomsday in Melbourne. We came up with ‘yes I will Yes’, a play using Molly Bloom’s monologue with three Mollys, teenage Gibraltar Molly, 1904 Molly, and 1922 Molly, i.e. youth, maturity, and age. The play is performed this week and next in Prahran, but I cannot attend due to recovery from surgery. I have helped contrive scripts for Bloomsday, on and off, since the last century. Theatricalisation of Joyce’s works is what distinguishes Melbourne from other Bloomsdays worldwide. It’s why a long time scriptwriter notices the many things about ‘Ulysses’ that cannot be theatricalised. First amongst these are what I call the ‘haiku’ of the novel, sentences descriptive of the present moment whose purpose is to situate the reader in time present. “Smokeplume of the mailboat, vague on the bright skyline.” “Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.” Extracted and arranged in order, they make a long journey to the deep north of Dublin, an anthology of readable urban occasions, if almost entirely resistant to staging. Allied to this is Joyce’s celebration of the five senses. The book is interleaved everywhere with lines about what we hear, see, smell, taste, and touch. Placed truly within the narrative pattern of each episode, most of these Joycean sentences are rarely just illustration for the story, but are composed to draw attention to themselves, ephemeral yet common effects of the physical city. ‘Getting Up James Joyce’s Nose’ was the 2017 theatre piece, living proof that an entire script can be inspired purely by odours, though how about the other senses? Passive reception becomes active expression in words, only how to get it right for performance? Another immediate subject of ‘Ulysses’ is geography, both natural and manmade. It is impossible to put on stage, or even on film, the immense airiness and space of Dublin Bay and Sandymount Strand that characterises the opening episodes. This familiarity with the city extends to the power of architecture, which is described and used in extra-Dickensian ways as vital characters, buildings being living heritage with individual and shared meanings for Dubliners. I once had photographs taken of certain rooflines of named addresses, but went no further with a script, and think now that immersion theatre would be an answer, but how? So much of the book is wordplay, a private reader’s pleasure that gets lost in the speed of performance. Never mind the stupendous cross-referencing (“metempsychosis”, for example) that enlivens the whole book. This, for example, infers Molly’s existence throughout, even though she only makes two main appearances, a string of hints that proved a creative frustration in writing this year’s script; everyone’s thinking about her, but where is she? All of this adds to the reasons no one has made a good ‘Ulysses’ movie, nor ever will. Then, moreover, we have ‘Finnegans Wake’, a work with literally limitless theatrical potential, if you only dare.