Glór prepares to be Joyced this February

JOYCED, Donal Kelly’s solo play will be performed by his daughter Katie O’Kelly at Glór on Saturday, February 9.
The play deals with a young Joyce and the day-to-day life of the man who would become one of the world’s most renowned writers.

JOYCED, Donal Kelly’s solo play will be performed by his daughter Katie O’Kelly at Glór on Saturday, February 9.
The play deals with a young Joyce and the day-to-day life of the man who would become one of the world’s most renowned writers.
“It’s a one-woman performance about Joyce in 1904 when he was kind of going through everything that a 22-year-old goes through, he was falling in love for the first time and he was going out drinking with his friends, kind of losing the run of himself a bit. At home, his father was drinking too much, he was a bit of a tyrant at the end. This is an extended version that we’re doing and it has flashbacks to when he was a child, growing up in Dublin. He kind of went on his own odyssey through Dublin, moving house. They lived in amazing houses in Bray, right on the sea front and they went right down till they also ended up living in slums, that’s charted as well,” Katie said.
She said that audiences won’t need to have an interest in Joyce’s work to enjoy the play, while she says the title refers to his tendency to exact revenge on people in his writing. “You don’t really need to have an understanding of Joyce at all, but if you know things about Joyce it’s great fun picking them out and seeing the references. The language is kind of Joycean, very Irish as well. He was always creating words and if one didn’t exist to explain something he’d make up his own one. The idea of being Joyced is that he was marking down these people who pissed him off basically and he was going to Joyce them later on; he was going to get his own back and immortalise them in his work forever more.”
Joyce took events from his own life and weaved them into his books and that’s something reflected in the play. “A lot of his stuff is autobiographical. You have a lot of characters in the show that are real people in Dublin who Joyce later turned into characters in Ulysses. You have Gogarty, who was Oliver St John Gogarty, he was a great friend of Joyce and he later became Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, which he wasn’t very proud of at all. He was pretty annoyed that Joyce had done that. “There’s actually a scene in the show of when Joyce went to stay with Gogarty at the Martello Tower in Sandycove and Gogarty thought it would be a laugh to shoot a gun over his head because he knew Joyce hated thunder, so Joyce had a bit of a vendetta after that so he made him a horrible guy in Ulysses. There’s a character in it, Alfred Hunter, a lovely man who became Bloom in Ulysses. Nora Barnacle was the real love of Joyce’s life and she would become Molly.”
While she says the play doesn’t require background knowledge, Katie herself is a huge admirer of Joyce. “I love him, I think he’s great. Ulysses is a tough one but there is some great stuff in it. I love Dubliners, his short stories are just great and very easy to read as well and enjoyable. There are little sections in the show about Dubliners as well.”
One-person shows are increasingly common in Irish theatre, largely because they require less funding than ones with bigger casts. While they are less costly they are very demanding of actors and Katie plays well over 20 characters in Joyced. “They (the characters) range from his little sisters to his Dad, to Gogarty, Nora Barnacle and Joyce himself. It’s definitely tiring but it’s so much fun to play so many and to have such a wide range. It’s great fun, it really is. I think that it creates images very clearly for the audiences as well.”
Bringing her father’s creation to the stage can be a little intimidating, but she says he doesn’t step on her toes too much. “It’s easier than I thought it would be, he’s been great, but it was a bit scary taking on a role that he wrote and performed himself. He has been great, he doesn’t give me too much direction on how to do it.”