BWW Reviews: ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2015: RIVERRUN Draws On James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Thursday 26th February 2015

James Joyce's sprawling masterpiece, Finnegan's Wake, goes beyond stream of consciousness to become a torrent, a river, indeed, the River Liffey that divides and unites the city of Dublin. Riverrun, its first word, is the unspoken last word in this tour de force of technical skill and imagination. Olwen Fouéré has adapted the sprawling text and directed it, with Kellie Hughes. This is her conception of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the spirit of the river and the city.

What is she thinking as she stands there on the stage as we file in and find our seats, a thin person in a dark suit with black shoes, white hair restrained? She watches us. Then the warning voice, soft and Irish accented (her voice?)."off with your phones not even silence will, if you leave you will not be readmitted'. Then she kneels and takes off her shoes before striding triumphant into the last chapter of the book that is Finnegan's Wake, where James rejoicing crushes, splashes and punts the Liffey, lifelike and lunatic.

The Playhouse stage is marked by a swirl of white chalk, low mounted spotlights around the sides and, centre front, an old fashioned microphone on a curiously twisted stand. It is here she stands, though the mike is a prop. She's body mic-ed as she prowls the stage, at one point whistling It's a Long Way to Tipperary.

Her first words are howled, and she overtones them, silver descants of notes above her throat driven ecstasy, and never again does this magical and shamanic thing, in a seventy minute grandeur of vocalization, of a text barely English, where words and ideals swirl and whirl.

Her performance is brilliant in its rhythmic complexity, the range of textures and tempos, her articulation of Joyce's created vocabulary, his wild multileveled puns, is exemplary. Every now and again something strikes home, something simple, direct, pungent, as Joyce was.

"I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny."

How does she do this, remembering the dismembered, sentenced, parsed and presented? How do her lungs and lights gleam and split, we are questionnaire?

Through the entire performance we, the ensemble planted, barely move, not a creak to signal boredom, all end and edged of seated forward. Then there is the background growling. Is it the cars? Is it the plague, the red and blue and black death? But it is right whatever source and sorcerous sending to this text of a made man madman for whom no language was adequate, flexible fanciful, proofed by non English speaking printers and their devils.

Remembering his words, in her voice, and the virus seeps into the writing of the review.

I was conceived in Dublin, though born in England and my father maintained his strong native accent till death, so I think I had a slight advantage over many in the Dunstan Playhouse. My theatre friends were in awe, as I was, of her feat of memory, her vocal agility, her ability to hold us spellbound with this seventy minute incantation that made thoughts of attending the Beckettt trilogy next door entirely unnecessary, for Joyce had laid it all out before us. Others, who perhaps had hoped for something more obviously sensual and articulate, such as the last pages of Ulysses and Molly Bloom's reminiscence of sex below the castle walls, were mystified and disappointed.

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