1999: MYTHIC JOYCE

Bloomsday in Melbourne (the first in the world?) started, disastrously, in the dark at 7.30am at Captain Cook's Cottage, with an invocation to the Muse from the Odyssey, as our theme in 1999 was Joyce's use of myth. Capt. Cook, of course, brought 'syphilisation' to the south seas, so his cottage, transplanted from Yorkshire, seemed a not inappropriate starting point. Why this was disastrous was that our stately Buck Mulligan slipped heavily and broke his ankle. Simon McGuinness was the original theatre director of Bloomsday in Melbourne and his acting is much admired, so he was a loss to us, especially as he had planned to represent the Bloomsday Players and do readings at the Irish Times Hotel, the alternative lunchtime venue.

Breakfast at the Pavilion Cafe in the Fitzroy Gardens (which looks out on magnificent Victorian plantings) involved a short and lively lecture by Prof. Dennis Pryor, a classicist who entertained us with accounts of the various disguises of Pallas Athena (which provided a nice contrast/parallel for the visit of Gummy Granny and her milk-pail), on Helen's dispensing of Heartsease (Greek for Prozac), and his personal favourite, Princess Nausicaa. A comedian, Mary Kenneally, responded with Joycean readings.

In seeking Homeric translations, the group organising the dramatisations/readings consulted various translations, sometimes conflating them, and occasionally used nineteenth-century poems based on the Odyssey. Kinsella's translation of The Tain was the source for Irish mythical materials. The Dolphin fountain (rocks and marine sculptures aplenty) provided and some wading water for Proteus, and a 'seascape' for Stephen, the hydrophobe (played by Jeff Keogh).

A row of magnificent date-palms served as frame for a reading from Calypso, focussing on Bloom's fantasies of the Orient. Before going into Hades, the groups divided for outdoors and indoors readings from Lotus Eaters. Tennyson sported a hairy beard and cape and was rather melodramatically didactic.

Bloomsday in Melbourne encourages students to have an investment in Bloomsday. In 1998, students mounted a gig in a restaurant which featured the prow of a ship (Sam's Boathouse Restaurant, Williamstown) in which they brought together the drowned men references in Proteus and Eumaeus. This year the same group (Jenny Lee, Robert Pitman and David Sornig) wanted to contribute again, but in a different medium: they made their first-ever 20 minute digital film, Me and Me Now?, based on Lestrygonians. It was parodic, and funny, and had indigenised the subject-matter, parts of it being shot in the hotel we were dining at. At one point, it purported to have had a computer failure and to have need to resort to the original pre-dubbed version in Italian, so the encounter between Bloom and Mrs. Breen was conducted in that language, to great comic effect. It was perhaps a tad self-indulgent and overly graphic in its focus on messy eating/cannibalism and managed to offend one older member of the community. We screened it to a sell-out crowd at a Luncheon gig, but, fortunately, after the food.

Another student group (led by Roz Lord, writer and director) mounted an excellent gig in an underground train station in which Bloom/Odysseus meets Ajax, Achilles, Sisyphus, Elpenor and Paddy Dignam, Rudi and Rudolph Virag. Unhappily this gig was marred by officious station staff who pulled regulations. To their credit, the actors ploughed on through. Such bureaucratic interventions are becoming a tradition for Bloomsday in Melbourne (in past years, horse-drawn carriages have had encounters with police-motorbikes and organisers been required to sign forms to remove horse-dung).

Another gig, entitled 'Gasbags, Inspissators and Blow-Artists and Aeolus' occurred on the steps of Parliament House where bits of Dan Dawson's speechifying were intercut with Odysseus's sailors releasing the winds. It featured a set of human windbags/headlines (Joycean, Irish, Australian and world-news) which morphed into a (human) printing machine.

The Queen's Hall in Parliament House was the venue for the seminar, so some Joycean insults of the old ogress with the yellow teeth were in order. The building did not fall down. Dr.Chris Worth (Monash University) delivered a paper on Joycean borrowings from Homer and focussed on the kinds of understandings of The Odyssey as an oral poem which were not available to Joyce. Dr. Frances Devlin-Glass (Deakin University) talked about Joyce's extensive use of the ancient Irish mythical heritage in the novel, and the reasons for his being backward in coming forward about this.

In the afternoon, a gig in the Parliamentary gardens featuring some of the eccentrics from Wandering Rocks went a tad astray, because a key actor who was planning to do some silly walks and change costume quite dramatically behind some Corinthian columns went missing. The reason for this became manifest later.

Sirens was celebrated with a short concert of mainly Joycean music sung, in the style of the period, by (Sister) Loretta Brennan (accompanied by Rosaleen O'Brien). Bloom's ambivalent response to songs of love and war provided the basis for the choice of repertoire. It occurred in the hall of St. Peter's Eastern Hill (an Anglican parish), and the acoustics were fabulous.

The Catholic Cathedral, across the road, was less than welcoming. We suspect (melodramatically?) that the Cathedral spy turned up in the guise of a blandly smiling lady with an umbrella who emerged (unsubtly) from the Cathedral precinct and disappeared into back it when we left the Cathedral. The committee had planned to gather at the feet of a 10-foot statue of Daniel O'Connell, to do readings based on The Citizen, Cuchulainn and Cyclops. The time would have been late afternoon, in early winter on the shady side of the cathedral. The only excuse given was 'unavailability.' Naturally, on the day, the grounds around the statue were empty, so one can only draw one's own conclusions about churchmen's ease with Joyce. The committee's correspondence with the cathedral was read, to the amusement of participants. However, this refusal provided an opportunity to deliver the Liberator from the Cathedral and unveil a "People's Dan" which emerged spectacularly from a giant copy of Ulysses in the form of a giant pop-up identical to the statue (constructed for Bloomsday in Melbourne by architect, Peter Jones). For the Cuchulainn reading, we had our own modern version - a spunky gym-type with a Narcissus complex (Sean Armistead) who worked the crowd with pizzaz .

Nausicaa boasted some of the youngest actors of the day (the youngest was 14), and a high-camp Canon O'Hanlon and Father Conroy. The Homeric Nausicaa seemed quite idealised by comparison with the Dublin girls whose eroticism was in no doubt.The contextualisation stressed the mismatch between their romantic aspirations and reality, and underlined their lack of economic prospects. The venue used for this gig was the Victorian Artists Society, and a gallery which featured a Joyce-inspired exhibition of paintings by June Jackson, some 44 paintings (in oils, watercolours and pastels, and some sketches) in all. June is a Dubliner who migrated here about ten years ago. Each episode was represented , as well as there being portraits of Joyce, Nora and others related to this literature. The exhibition ran for the week preceding Bloomsday.

The penultimate gig of the day was our traditional 'silly' one - The Papal Bull Ballet, another world premiere. St. Vincent's Hospital (bless the nuns who are rather more liberal than their Archbishop - 'If it's Joyce, it will be good') provided the space in an abandoned ward. The episode from Oxen of the Sun which was dramatised in the medium of Irish dance (choreographed by Maureen Andrew) was Joyce's parody in the style of Swift of the account of the coming of the Normans to Ireland, and the castration of the Papal Bull. While the historical allegory was outlined, Mina gave painful birth, and the papal bull, in soutane and bull's head showed his paces. His evasion of the Vet provided scope for virtuoso high kicks by a champion of the genre, Raymond Ayres, and much comedy as the red, white and blue balloons which constituted his power were variously attacked and finally snipped by the vet wielding hedge-shears.

We think we can probably claim a world first in dramatising Ithaca (with some intercutting of Penelope) for our major evening performance. It was performed by 11 professional actors (a Narrator and Assistant who sparred, and Stephen and Bloom speaking not to each other but to the audience in a Brechtian manner, with occasional appearances by a Spruiker, a Rabbi and a Greek Scholar, and a Molly who materialised for the second half) and was directed by Howard Stanley. Two percussionists (Laurence Strangio and Philip Harvey) provided a superb comic soundscape, in full view of the audience, with all manner of instruments and objects, and provided boom-booms for the jokes. In addition, some of Joyce's encyclopaedic information was provided by means of overheads (the water's traverse from Roundtown Reservoir; types of calendars and how they compare, Bloom's and Stephen's relative ages etc. etc.). An unlikely chapter to theatricalise, but that's what happened. There is no doubt that the 16 events gave much satisfaction to a large and loyal following (some fell away around 5pm but fresh devotees replaced them). We estimate our following to be in the area of 2500, if one counts bodies at each of the 16 gigs. Apart from healthy attendance figures, the best reward for the day was the number of patrons who resolved to properly read a novel which had intimidated them and a multiplicity of requests for the best edition and the most approachable critical guides.