Calico
Duke of York's Theatre, London

Patrick Hayes

Calico is the story of the relationship between the young Samuel Beckett and James Joyce's daughter. It is about an hour too long. It wallows in unnecessary vulgarities and tips its hat to Joyce and Beckett so blatantly and so often it's a surprise they're not selling 'I Spy' books as you enter. It is a measure of Michael Hastings' developing talents as a playwright and a credit to the excellent ensemble of actors that certain threads of remarkable insight still shine through.

This play is not about Joyce, who is portrayed as a caricature of his former self. Nor is it about Beckett, who is portayed as an empathetic, and often silent Other, introduced to the household as an unpaid assistant to Joyce. Rather Calico is about the descent into madness of young Lucia Joyce whose liberal, Bohemian upbringing in the Joyce family has estranged her irreversibly from the restrictions and taboos of European society in the 1920s.

Despite her youth, Lucia can speak six languages, has travelled and lived across Europe and can effortlessly word-spar with her father. She is a product of a tremendously unorthodox family with liberal views toward sex, marriage, religion and child-rearing. Cocooned within the family, she has been reared in a beautiful innocence - encouraged to explore the boundless imagination of the 'child' with any questions she might have answered with insightful comments.

This innocence is first nature to Lucia - unlike her parents, she has not chosen her way of life by deliberately defining herself against the restrictions of mainstream society. Thus, when she attempts to interact with the world outside the family, she finds herself without a solid identity - this is well expressed in her intuitive desire to hide from the gaze of those who do not understand her by hiding in cupboards or under beds.

The Joyces have chosen to try to redefine themselves as respectable in Paris, as a 'decent upright family'. This upsets the way the family operates and deeply affects Lucia who, attempting to reconcile the old and new personae of the family, finds she cannot cope with the lies and the contradictions that arise.

Lucia becomes deeply estranged from her original sense of self and, is unable to channel this estrangement through art in the same way that her father and, to a lesser extent, her (quite unremarkable) brother can. As a result she begins to inhabit her imagination rather than reality, and she is supported in this by the creative insights of Beckett, who forms an 'imaginary relationship' with her, giving her the recognition necessary to sustain her sense of identity. Her dependence upon Beckett puts a burden of pressure on the young man that he knows he cannot indefinitely sustain.

The second half of the play charts Lucia's descent into an understandable state of madness. She becomes a Modernist Ophelia. Apart from a pitiful attempt to incorporate Tourrette's syndrome into the story, Hastings masterfully outlines Lucia's attempts to reconcile her inner life with the world. She will spend hours under the bed staring up at the calico; but she also wanders the street until the early hours. Her reason for doing this is left deliciously ambiguous, and it is telling that most people (including the writer of the programme) seem to see her as a prostitute. This is surely a misinterpretation of her character. She is more likely to be roaming the late night Bohemian bustle of Paris, breathing in the crisp air and marvelling at the way it makes the gaslights twinkle.

The only truly human bond in the play is Lucia's relationship with Beckett. They are trapped in a tragic Platonic relationship, an ideal doomed (even with Plato) to terrible frustration and failure. If one chooses to prioritise the world of the imagination over the physical world, there will inevitably be a detachment from both the body and the passions. The shared intellectual world becomes one of masochism and futility as attempts to integrate the world of the mind (love) with the world of the body (desire) fail. Distressingly, even an attempt to escape temporality and have simply a single moment of unity of the love of the mind and the desire of the body is disrupted. The relationship ends as the play does, with two people desperately reaching out their hands to one another, fully aware of the futility of the situation, but getting flashes of what could be and still hoping and dreaming.

Creativity is here perceived as an attempt to transcend the alienating, contradictory structures of society through the postulation of an ideal identity that the individual wishes to inhabit. Joyce, as an artist, has the skills to be able to wrest out his understanding of the world into a universal format. He attains this understanding through a strong awareness of the world around him that he has defined himself against. Lucia, the person who actually attempts to inhabit the ideal life postulated (but not realised) by her father, lacks such skills, and becomes dependent on the always uncertain gifts of love and recognition from others.

Unable to channel her creative mind, Lucia begins to filter into multiple, irreconcilable identities which ultimately lead to increasingly erratic actions. Inevitably then she is labelled as mad by those who cannot possibly comprehend, or simply those, ultimately like Joyce himself, who know a line has to be drawn and that she is drawing it herself by her actions.

Directorial concessions had to be made to bring this play to the West End in order to entertain and sustain audience engagement. Hastings' script is too flawed to be a masterpiece, but his underlying understanding shows great promise. In a world dominated by the attempt to patch up estrangement through therapy, we need more Calicos, more works that show us the social and intellectual mechanisms that force some to act in a manner that has to be described as mad.

Till 29 May