Reviews 2001
Reviews 2001
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Craig Walker
Theatre Kingston, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
May 17-June 3, 2001
“Here Comes Everybody”
James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1939), one of the world's greatest novels, is also one of the least read. Joyce took the technique of stream-of-consciousness he used in "Ulysses" (1922) to its ultimate point in "Finnegans Wake" in what has been called "stream-of-unconsciousness". The dream-language of the novel, which Joyce called a "universal history", besides defying normal punctuation and grammar, has the highest quotient of polyglot word-play and allusion per line of any work ever written. A person has to surrender to this language in order to enter a realm where the world of myth and the world of the individual are one.
It thus might seem all the more impossible that this work could ever be successfully adapted for the stage. Yet Craig Walker, Artistic Director of Theatre Kingston, has accomplished this feat with great aplomb. Most stage adaptations of novels have two failings. Attention to character is often sacrificed to an attempt to cover as much plot as possible, and the language used to move the plot forward often becomes tediously prosaic compared to the detail and expansiveness a novel allows. Walker's adaptation avoids both these pitfalls. The novel itself has no conventional plot and is more concerned with the series of dreamlike transformations its archetypal family undergoes. As plays like "Stones in His Pockets" or "The Island" show, the natural mode of theatre is transformation where the attitude of play, in all its meanings, can change anything into anything else at will. It is the highly theatrical nature of Walker's adaptation and direction that makes the novel feel so at home on stage.
Given the incredible richness of the source text, the language of the play, even when modified or translated from the original, never loses its sense of polyvalency. On the one hand, this means that is it pretty much impossible to catch every word, especially when the language is so full of nonce formations, allusions and puns. On the other hand, after some initial resistance, the mind pleasurably situates itself somewhere between consciously and subconsciously apprehending the action. It is an important achievement of the play to create in an audience this unusual but enjoyable mode of perception.
With the audience seated on either side of the playing area, the action takes place in the space between the opaque glass door and windows to the Salmon House pub and detailed bar (with one support rising as a gnarled tree trunk) designed by Lindsay Anne Black. The bar is surmounted by a inclined bed where our hero-dreamer, HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker or "Here Comes Everybody" inter alia) is discovered asleep with his wife ALP (Anna Livia Pluribelle or "Art, literature, politics" inter alia). We see HCE impugned with sinning with two girls in Dublin's Phoenix Park, his rise (up a ladder), his (literal) fall, his presumed death, and, laid out on the bar for his wake, his awakening or resurrection. Until dream-dispelling dawn, he and his wife and their battling twin sons, Shaun and Shem, and their daughter Izzy find their lives recapitulating every every Western myth involving fathers, wives, sons, daughters, lovers, from the ancient legend of the giant Finn McCool to Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to figures of Joyce's own Ireland.
Walker has each stage of the action, with chapter titles projected on the pub door, involve a different form of theatrical invention--whether it is two gossiping washerwomen by a blue cloth as the river Liffey "drying" their clothes on the knees of those in the front row, Shaun's fable of the Gracehoper and the Ondt played out with Black's clever puppets, HCE's supposed sin acted as a shadow play behind the pub door or the mimed Wagnerian opera of Tristan and Isolde. Irish dance and lively songs in the Irish style, also by Walker, and punctuate the action enhancing both the pub-like atmosphere and the nature of the play as performance. Kathryn MacKay's costumes set us in the specific period of the action, with Shem the artist clad as the young Joyce, while Dan Rider's inventive lighting plays a major role in grounding us in the reality of the pub or freeing us into the realm of myth.
Some episodes are modernized. Walker has made the riddles of Chapter 9 into a television quiz show complete with applause sign and has turned the homework section of Chapter 10 into an hilarious illustrated school lesson about cyclical interpretations of history and myth from Giambattista Vico past Joyce's own time to Northrop Frye. Both scenes link the action to the present while providing an overview of its themes and structure.
The cast is uniformly excellent, though, inevitably, some can project Joyce's/Walker's dream-language more clearly than others. It is invidious to single out members of such an ensemble piece, but I must say that Rosemary Doyle (ALP) navigates her way through some of the most difficult language in the play with particular clarity, while Mo Bock (HCE) perfectly captures the humour, anger and befuddlement of someone sleepwalking through the ever-changing landscape of his mind. Esther Barlow (Izzy), Mark Hauser (Shaun), Kevin Head (Tom), Patricia Murray (Kate) and Stephen Sheffer (Shem) all acquit themselves well both in their primary and subsidiary roles.
There is no doubt that the better you know the novel "Finnegans Wake" the more you will get out of the play, but then a thorough study of the novel is itself a life's work. The play basically gives us a cross-section of the novel attractive in its own right. My companion who knew nothing of the novel, had no trouble following the action or the transformations of the characters and clued into the sense if not every last word of the dialogue. For the adventurous theatre-goer "Finnegans Wake" will prove an exciting and illuminating evening not unlike the best offerings at the Shaw Festival's Court House Theatre. This is Theatre Kingston's first visit to Toronto. In view of this assured production and the the high order of talent on display in all departments, let's hope a another visit is in the offing.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Musicians of Finnegan’s Wake. ©2001 Theatre Kingston.
2001-05-21
Finnegan’s Wake