(AGENPARL) – mar 14 marzo 2023 Book early for three Bloomsday events
[View this email in your browser](https://mailchi.mp/jamesjoyce/bloomsday-festival-2023-theatre-highlights?e=f237f2313a)
Dear subscribers,
Preparations for Bloomsday Festival 2023 are already underway!Over the next few months we will be sending out news and information about our complete festival programme.
In our first festival newsletter, we have included some highlights from our theatre selection. Be sure to book early as tickets sell out fast!
A Rare Journey: Nora Joyce’s Odyssey
by Paula Greevy-Lee
TICKETS: Starting at €18
TIME/DATE: 8pm, 13th-17th June | 1.30pm, 16th-17th June
“All those memories keep crowding my mind, like bits of auld songs only half remembered and then gone again.”
A one-woman show which celebrates the life of Joyce’s wife, Nora, a remarkable Irish woman in her own right. The play, written and performed by Paula Greevy-Lee, is highly entertaining and filled with music, giving free reign to Nora’s witty and often acerbic commentary on her life and times.
Beginning in 1946, five years after the death of James Joyce, A Rare Journey opens as Nora prepares to meet a young American journalist in a café in Zurich, where she still lives until she can get her late husband’s remains repatriated to Ireland. Anxious about what questions she’ll be asked by the journalist – and which ones she’ll answer! – Nora retraces the exhilarating highs and best-left-unsaid lows of her life since the fateful meeting with a cocky young James Joyce on Nassau Street all those years ago.
James Joyce’s Dubliners Interpreted in Song
by Hibsen
TICKETS: Starting at €18
TIME/DATE: 7.30pm, 9-10 June
Irish folk music act Hibsen pay homage to James Joyce with performances of their debut album “The Stern Task of Living” under the aegis of the Bloomsday Festival, with thanks to Irish Life and AVIVA for sponsoring the performances.
“The Stern Task of Living” is a collection of 15 original songs, one for each short story in Dubliners, with the lyrics and music written by Jim Murphy and Gráinne Hunt. Each song captures the essence of its story though its lyrics and the sentiment of its story through its music.
An ensemble of ten musicians, including the string quartet Musici, will perform the full album live. In addition, Frank McNally of The Irish Times will recite selected passages from Dubliners at various points during the performance.
Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom
by Aedin Moloney and Colum McCann
TICKETS: Starting at €16
TIME/DATE: 7.30pm, 13-17 June | 2.30pm, 17 June
The New Theatre presents Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom, written by Aedin Moloney and Colum McCann and performed by the Wild Mountain Flower Productions.
A daring theatrical journey into the mind and heart of James Joyce’s most sensual hero – a woman of women, a soul of souls, the indomitable Molly Bloom.
It is Ireland in the early hours of June 17th, 1904. Molly Bloom’s husband – the philandering Leopold “Poldy” Bloom – has just come home and fallen asleep in their Dublin row house. Molly – a daughter, a mother, a lover, and a long-suffering wife – patrols the pathways of her wild and leaping consciousness. She is lustful. Scared. Exuberant. Heartbreakingly lonely. Vivaciously reckless. And profoundly funny.
With an empty nest, an unfulfilling affair, and a marriage long past its prime, Molly contemplates the love that she and Bloom once shared. Her unsentimental stream of consciousness is a song of songs that reaches backward and forward across the centuries. Molly seeks to reanimate that love of Bloom and ends up discovering herself – as a woman seeking purpose and a desire to be relevant, even after that love is over and her children are gone. Through reflection, Dublin becomes Gibraltar, age becomes youth, and a small room in Ireland becomes the world.
A beautiful and honest reflection of Molly’s life, written by James Joyce, adapted for the stage by Aedín Moloney and Colum McCann, with original music by Paddy Moloney (Founder and Leader of The Chieftains), Aedín Moloney’s one-woman performance is a tribute to the enduring mysteries of loss and love – and the affirmation found, yes, in between. It also considers, as Joyce does, a time in which a woman’s life and choices in Dublin were shaped more fully by a man. Yes!
Copyright © 2023 James Joyce Cultural Centre Ltd., All rights reserved.