At Home and Abroad

Declan Gorman Welcome O Joyce, a staged reading by Declan Gorman of a new performance to mark 100 years since the first appearance in print of an extract from Finnegans Wake. Welcome O Joyce (co-written by Declan Gorman and Des Gunning) has been specially commissioned for the James Joyce Association of Ottawa and the James Joyce Centre, Dublin, and is the curtain-raiser to this year’s international Bloomsday Festival. It is a montage of pieces from the four great prose works of Joyce, commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of the first appearance in print of an extract of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake (1939). The 1924 ‘Mamalujo’ fragment is woven into an entertaining short presentation that includes a comic prologue and vivid scenes from Ulysses (1922), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Dubliners (1914) Declan Gorman is a highly regarded writer, director and performer. His previous Joyce performances The Dubliners Dilemma (2012) and Falling Through the Universe (2022) have toured widely in Ireland and overseas. In the week of Bloomsday, Declan will travel on to Ottawa, Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario with a selection of his Joyce works. From Oslo to Mayo to Moscow, Declan Gorman’s performance based on James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ has enthralled audiences and critics nationally and internationally over the past five years. Back home for Bloomsday 2017 for five showings only, this is an unmissable slice of Dublin and Joyce’s world by one of Ireland’s most versatile theatre artists. It begins in London shortly before WW1, in the basement workroom of publisher Grant Richards, who had previously rejected ‘Dubliners’ out of worry it might breach strict obscenity laws. Now he re-reads the maunscript and recalls his uncomfortable correspondence with the truculent young genius. Should he reconsider and publish now? In all their magical glory, the stories of Dublin come to vivid life around him.