June 17, 2011

Bloomsday

Steve Dedalus    posted 14 Jun 2011, 10:51 PM / edited 14 Jun 2011, 11:15 PM

That Auckland Bloomsday show announced in your news — I’ve seen it in past years.

It is sensational. None other like it.

If Auckland wants to be taken seriously as a world-class city, it doesn’t need a new casino-promoted Convention Centre, it needs more scabrous back-alley art like this.

This is what makes a world-class city.

Steve Dedalus    posted 17 Jun 2011, 08:08 AM / edited 17 Jun 2011, 08:10 AM

THE ONLY HIBERNO-HEBREW BLOOMSDAY IN THE KNOWN WORLD

Jews Bros’ Bloomsday

By James Joyce and the Jews Brothers

Directed by Hershal Herscher

For one night only, feast-day of June 16, Thirsty Dog Tavern, K’ Rd, Auckland

Reviewed by Steve Dedalus.

For the record, Auckland’s Bloomsday celebrations went off as brilliantly as ever on Thursday night to a packed house.

Bloomsday is the annual international celebration of James Joyce’s comic masterpiece Ulysses.

It takes place every June 16, the same date the novel is set.

It gets its name from the central character, Leopold Bloom, wandering Jew, who spends the day and night perambulating about Dublin in a mock-parallel to the legendary voyage and adventures of ancient Greek hero Ulysses.

Auckland’s Bloomsday has been an annual event over the last ten years.

Thursday night’s two-and-a-half hour production took place at the Thirsty Dog pub on red-light K’ Rd.

Punters on arrival were greeted with a big-screen showing of the1954 colour spectacular Ulysses—Kirk Douglas fighting the one-eyed Cyclops and seeing his crew turned into swine and then having to outwit the Sirens’ lure as back home poor Penelope fends off her suitors. The movie was presented mute, its soundtrack replaced by a recording of Irish tenors: “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen…” “The pale moon was rising above the green mountains / The sun was declining beneath the blue sea…” Prepare yourself for an inspired evening.

Following a klezmer opening by the Jews Brothers Band (the show describes itself as “the only Hiberno-Hebrew Bloomsday in the known world”), and then Linn Lorkin singing her own number, “I’m so happy, on Karangahape Road,” part one began.

Leopold Bloom (Hershal Herscher) attends to his early-morning ablutions. The description of this, considered by Virginia Woolf one of the most disgusting episodes in English literature, is read with tender verve by local Irish actor Brian Keegan.

We then learn of Bloom’s domestic problems. Molly Bloom (Linn Lorkin) performs a rap number, “It’s eighteen months since you did this or that to me / Or even laid a hand on my anatomy!”

We learn that Molly has sought comfort from her loneliness and has taken a lover, a variety hall concert artiste Blazes Boylan. Former Auckland Equity branch secretary Farrell Cleary slides up like a lounge lizard and grandly begins Mozart’s La Ci Darem to be followed by stunning mezzo soprano Yuko Takahashi, whose silver singing—so unexpected in a K’ Rd pub—brings the house down.

Bloom now sets out on his perambulations, all the time hearing in the background his faithless wife chorusing “Love’s old sweet song.”

Brian Keegan gives a reading with relish as peckish Bloom calls in to Burton’s restaurant and views in disgust its slopping diners, causing the Jews Brothers Band to break into their standard, “Dunkin’ Bagels.”

The first of the major dramatised sequences then begins as Bloom moves to Barney Kiernan’s pub and is confronted by the one-eyed cyclopean Irish nationalist, The Citizen—in this instance played by “Irish Joe” Carolan, an Auckland Unite Union organiser with a piercing Dundalk accent. At the same time as playing The Citizen, one eye screwed up, he also plays The Citizen’s mangy dog—no mean feat—while maintaining string of abuse and chanting, “Oo, aa, up the ‘RA!”

Part one ends soothingly with a barbershop quartet rising mellifluously from a corner table to sing Danny Boy.

Part two begins with a fabulous reading of Gerty McDowell parading herself on Sandymount beach. Linn Lorkin sings the Catholic hymn “Hail Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star”. Bloom is excited, then spent, then melancholic, and the band gives us a brilliant “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

The second big dramatisation now bursts on to the small stage. An astonishing Bruce Hopkins appears as a 1904 transvestite dominatrix, Bella Cohen, dressed more insanely than anything you’d see on K’ Rd (AND with painted moustache) and who transmogrifies before our very transfixed eyes into Helen— Helen of Troy, Helen of Wellington, Helen of New York:

BLOOM: Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which women love.

BELLA:  We have met. You are mine. It is fate.

BLOOM:  Exuberant female!

BELLA:  You may call me—Helen.

BLOOM: Helen!?

BELLA:  Indeed.

BLOOM:  But Helen, you left us for New York!

BELLA: I am back to lead the party.

BLOOM: Enormously we desiderate your domination!

BELLA: And you’ll get it. For I am Helen.

The truth is I never left you

All through my wild days

My mad existence

I kept my promise

Don’t keep your distance…

… And while Bloom is on the floor lacing up Bella’s hot goathide boots, Bruce Hopkins exhales upon the poor cuckold the longest fart in NZ stage history. As if any further humiliation were required, we hear Linn/Molly singing again love’s old sweet song.

Part three begins with a boisterous jig and reader Brian Keegan confessing, “Bless me Father for what I’ve done / I did a dirty big shite in front of a nun / I pissed on a penguin in the Dublin zoo /

An’ stuck a rasher up the arse of a kangaroo / I spat on a baby at a baptismal urn / And had impure thoughts about [Auckland Central Labour candidate] Jacinda Adern…”

Bloom is now caught up in confrontation with two British squaddies which ends with political commentator and rather fine and powerful tenor Chris Trotter standing up midst the audience and singing a ballad to union leader James Connolly, executed by the British in 1916. There is a stand-alone musical sequence here that deftly conflates the Irish colonial experience into the Connolly ballad, then Linn Lorkin singing “The Croppy Boy” and then the band giving us an extended version of Brecht/Weill’s Alabama Song (“Oh, show me the way to the next whiskey bar…”)

The show builds on to its climax, a 1200-word unpunctuated soliloquy, edited down from the 50 pages in Ulysses. The soliloquy is a flow of images, much of them explicit, as Molly Bloom drifts to sleep. This is stunningly paced and flawlessly delivered by Robyn Malcolm—fittingly, for Robyn Malcolm last year gave us that other great Irish soliloquy, Winnie’s, in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at the Herald Theatre.

Immediately Molly/Robyn climaxes with that most famous of last words, “Yes!”, Linn Lorkin leads the band through a spectacular and affecting “Yes! Je ne regrette rien!”

The audience howled for an encore. “What do you mean, an encore?” shouted back bass player Peter Scott, “This is a play!”

Sensational stuff. How many shows do you get where you find yourself in the company of a buzzing audience that includes poets and playwrights and political activists? And have performers like this fabulous array? And have a life-size effigy of James Joyce leaning back on stage and coolly watching a reading of a novel of his, and that reading accompanied by a band called The Jews Brothers? And how many venues do you get where you can look out past the enraptured audience through a window and see the city’s hookers a few yards away peering back in?

Sensational stuff. Nothing like it. James Joyce pulls it off.