Having tackled the unhappy lives of TS Eliot and his wife Vivien in the eighties, Michael Hastings has now turned his attention to the even more torn James Joyce and his daughter, the latter engaged in a strange relationship with Samuel Beckett, then a junior lecturer in a Paris high school but also employed in an unpaid capacity by the practically blind Joyce as an amanuensis.
As a few pages from literary history, it is perhaps spurious but there is no doubt that Hastings makes it a gripping play as we observe Lucia, tortured with sexual fantasies which, according to Hastings, on evidence that may have been deliberately destroyed, was caused by an incestuous relationship between the two.
To compound this particular liaison, there is also the damaged mental state of the novelist’s common-law wife Nora Barnacle, whom Joyce, rightly or wrongly, believes he has rescued from a life of prostitution. Then there is the son, Giorgio, hoping to become an opera singer but pursued by a wealthy American woman, Helen Fleischman, unacceptable to Nora’s puritan ideals on the grounds that she is both still married and a Jewess.
One has to say that it is surprisingly amusing at times and intensely moving at others, as Lucia’s wild mood swings and erotic writhings give testament to her mental condition, which Hastings suggests may be a form of Tourette’s Syndrome.
Romola Garai makes a quite remarkable theatre debut as Lucia and Imelda Staunton is a memorable Nora but Dermot Crowley struggles to make an impact in the underwritten role of James Joyce. Howver, the direction manages to draw out interesting performances from Daniel Weyman as the bemused but highly sympathetic Beckett, Issy Van Randwyck as Helen, Jamie Beamish, who also has to sing capably as Giorgio, and Robert Portal as fellow lecturer McGreevy, with a strange after-dark life of his own.
Praise too for an excellent two-level setting by Francis O’Connor and Mick Sands’ musical score, which flows throughout the action, played by pianist Helen Washington.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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