Joyce’s Wake and Other Full-length Plays

In ‘Joyce’s Wake’ we see what an utter failure James Joyce was as a family man. The ‘wake’ in the title refers to that of his children, especially Lucia, who suffered at the hands of her father. (She also had an ill-judged affair with Samuel Beckett whom she loved.) Lucia ended her life in an asylum and her brother, Giorgio, became an alcoholic. Does the creation of great literature have to take such a toll? The ‘High Priest of Hackballscross’ explores the dynamics of a local drama group putting on a Passion Play in a small town. The tension of performing exposes character flaws among the actors, hidden desires and all-too-human passions.

In ‘Wherewithal’, an emigrant returns to help the town he had to leave twenty years ago. He seeks political office and comes up against a hostile cabal that will stop at nothing to keep him out.

‘Get Up’ is a futuristic piece about a new regime that seeks to rehabilitate a former political enemy for their own reasons, and to build alliances with the global superpower.

In ‘Wait Now’ two losers - one a robot - are hired to dress a stage for some absurdist play. The director never comes but the dramaturg does, and s/he (a state of the art android) forces them to ad lib a play that ends very badly for them.

The beauty of play scripts - when done well, as here - is that they plunge us into the action. Our imagination engages from the start. The great range of these plays, from Joyce’s troubled daughter through careening passion play to the absurd at play in multiple dystopian futures, is in the end a stream of questions around who we are, what we want, and what awaits us all.
- Peter FitzGerald