Awake in the shed

On St. Patrick's Day to a show built from Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake' (no apostrophe in my copy, a nice 1968 reprint from Faber. A matter, no doubt, for much scholarship in some university in the Mid-West where such things are treated with the seriousness they deserve).

A book which I have not got further with than dipping. In small doses, engaging and sometimes very funny, but hard going and I doubt whether I shall ever read more than the odd page at a sitting.

A book which starts with a lower case 'r', which does not end with a full stop and which comes with no apparatus whatsoever. No introduction by a scholar, no preface by the author, no biography of the author, no contents page, no chapters: just in at the beginning and out at the end. Although, to be fair, there are four parts, there are page numbers and one could write the number of the first page of each part inside the cover for ease of reference.

A book which I sometimes think is a very elaborate practical joke, largely paid for by Joyce's long suffering lady backer, one Harriet Shaw Weaver (who, oddly enough, graduated to backing Commies after having had enough of backing Joyce). A huge vocabulary, a huge amount of energy and a huge amount of brain power poured into 628 pages of clever nonsense. Nonsense with very little content of the conventional boy meets girl or boy goes to battle variety; a mutant cross word puzzle.

That being as it may, one Olwen Fouéré has turned some short extracts into a one woman show (excluding, that is, the small herd of production and creative staff) of about an hour, which arrived at the Shed at the National Theatre after various outings at Irish literary & dramatic festivals. The first word of the show 'sandhyas' (see illustration above) is a fair sample: how many wannabee Inspector Morse's would know that this is a Sanskrit word about a ritual performed at dawn, noon and dusk, rather carelessly rendered in the programme as 'the twilight of dawn'?

But Olwen Fouéré (http://www.olwenfouere.com/) brings huge energy to her recital, managing a lot of tightly controlled limb, body and face movement while still getting the words out with tremendous verve; someone who appeared to have a strong mime background and who managed to bring the nonsense to life. She was able to pour the stuff out as if it meant something. She was not frightened to appear lean and old, stripped down at the end to a singlet and trousers. And, sitting where we were, facing down at her from above, she had the trick of making you think she was performing just for you, looking straight at one with her strikingly made up eyes, although I don't suppose she actually saw much of the audience at all. Altogether, rather good, a triumph of performance over text rather than a triumph over text over performance, this last being a suggestion overheard on the way out. But an hour, maybe 10 pages out of the 600, was enough.

Full house, including a lot more young people than usually attend the sort of things that I attend. Neither of the two I spoke to were there for Finnegan, they were there for the theatre. Which, as a venue, was spot on for a show of this sort.