Joyced!

Bewley’s Café Theatre, Dublin

One of the most curious aspects about the status that James Joyce enjoys, is that while his work can be hard to follow, his steps are quite easy to retrace. Ulysses, an odyssey through Dublin on June 14, 1904, is the obvious example: you can dress up like Leopold Bloom, tour the city and eat kidneys for breakfast with relish, which, for many, will be as close as they ever come to reading the damn book.

Donal O’Kelly’s 2004 play Jimmy Joyced! took a different tact, approaching the man through the lens of his fiction, aiming to “rescue Jimmy Joyce” from the labyrinth (“The academics have him”), by creating a portrait of the artist as a young man in 1904 while trapping the real-life inspirations for his characters, as each of them is “Joyced”.

Told through the eyes of a contemporaneous Dublin stallholder, JJ Staines, O’Kelly’s original play took a more essential route still, by focusing on the fraught father-son dynamic between John Stanislaus and James, then refracting it through Greek myth into Joyce’s literature with various Daedalus allusions. This slightly altered new version might have played more archly on that notion of family drama: the narrator is now JoJo, JJ’s son, and he is played by Katie O’Kelly, Donal’s daughter.

Inheriting the creation of your father is no easy task (just ask Icarus), especially when one as idiosyncratic as Donal O’Kelly’s imaginative and physical performance. If Katie O’Kelly doesn’t fly as high with its multiple roles and cavorting word play, challenged by the brisk demands of character delineation and slowed by heavy caricatures, it may be because few performers could step lightly into these shoes, or, in the case of director Sorcha Fox’s production, these strap-on wings.

What O’Kelly does supply is conviction and amperage, telescoping the events of a year in the life of an alternately frustrated and enlivened 22-year-old into an hour of stage time.

If that conjures the familiar sensation that Joyce ambled through life, rebounding from rejecting editors, a drunken father, a coterie of “minions” and finally into the arms and capable hands of Nora Barnacle, it is because O’Kelly’s feat is to map Joyce’s biographical movements along the path of his fiction. Many people have been Joyced, it claims, but Joyce, it seems, has been well and truly Bloomed.

Runs until April 28th