 |
 |
 |  |
 |  | |||||||||||||
|
archive |
about
us |
links |
contact |
current | ||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Exiles |
|
Ed
Lake | |
|
James Joyce's reputation for difficulty is mostly overblown - but not in the case of Exiles. His only play, written as he was abandoning the sharp satirical sketches of his early career for the prodigious word salads of his maturity, is, frankly, a bit of a mess. Nowhere is he less funny, and nowhere more ridiculous than in this sour portrait of the dramatist as a misunderstood moral pioneer. Alas, James MacDonald's leaden NT production is too much in awe of the great man to poke the fun he richly deserves. MacDonald gives us a curio; had he shown a more Joycean intransigence towards his text, he might have given us a good time instead. Richard Rowen (Peter McDonald) is back in Dublin following the publication of his acclaimed first book. With him is his wife Bertha (Dervla Kirwan), a working class girl with whom he eloped to Europe nine years previously. Robert Hands (Adrian Dunbar) - Rowan's boyhood friend, now a florid leader-writer and self-appointed society fixer - enters the scene, ostensibly to arrange an academic post for Mr Rowen, actually to seduce Bertha. The twist: everything that passes between Hands and Bertha is relayed to Rowen by Bertha in the course of one of the sinister, vaguely ecclesiastical interrogations which make up their marriage. Rowen is reluctant to step in: he denies he has the right. But do his scruples on this point owe to some special moral virtue of his, or merely to a masochistic streak? And what about his preoccupation with this question? Or that one? He snaps out of it when he discovers that Hands has sent him on a fool's errand, to distract him from a planned sexual assignation with Bertha. Rowen goes in his wife's place, surprising Hands at home and engaging him in a duel of morbid self-examination. The pair talk themselves out and embrace pietistically before there is another knock at the door: Bertha. Rowen retires so Hands can try his luck, to no avail. Bertha is too distraught at the extreme tiresomeness of both men to contemplate any extracurricular intercourse. She returns to Rowen in despair and he rewards her constancy with a Man of Sorrows pose. The fact that, beneath the thinnest of disguises, Rowen is Joyce himself can't hide the fact that the man is an arse. His self-absorption and preciousness would scarcely be tolerable were they not sprinkled with Joycean stardust. McDonald is not so sprinkled: he might make quite a good Captain Stanhope and he'd lend a nice bit of grit to a Sam Gamgee, but he doesn't pull off the restless genius schtick here. The nocturnal wanderings and prolific writing jags which are presumably intended to play as the throes of Romantic inspiration actually come off as lunkish tantrums. True, Joyce often flirts with bathos throughout his oeuvre - but McDonald marries it and downsizes to a bungalow called Duncaring. It's a pity: an actor more alert to the ludic side of Rowen's paradoxes might have got something quite fun out of the role. Adrian Dunbar's Robert Hands is better: exuberant in his duplicity, he still inspires pity when it dawns on him that he has been betrayed. He is vigorous, charismatic - but hardly a seducer. And his domination of McDonald looks so effortless as to rather spoil the point of the play. Only Kirwan's Bertha manages to dig her way out of the deadly prolixity that swamps Exiles - chiefly because she rails at it with an exasperation which I found quite understandable. Exiles is a difficult play, much as I imagine Joyce must have been rather a difficult husband. Till 26 October 2006.
|
|
|