Joyce and the Jesuits at Newman, 16 June 2007

Program of Events

12.00–12.45pm: Tour of Newman College by Professor Jeff Turnbull, highlighting the College’s architectural significance.

Professor Jeff Turbull, architect and historian, began his tour outside the chapel, moving into the central courtyard of Newman, and then into the splendid dining room of the college and the Rector’s private offices. He spoke of the teamwork of the teamwork of Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marian, and in particular of her competence in translating a rough sketch of the design from back of envelope to full-scale architectural drawings. The harmoniousness of the whole belied the eclecticism of its influences – Oxbridge colleges, Cambodian stupas, bridges like the Ponte Vecchio. The democratic aspirations of the interior design were a point of contact with Joyce.

1.00–3.00pm: Matinee performance of our arcade-style show, held in a variety of venues around Newman College:

Jejune Jesuit
Directed by Karen Corbett

Jejune Jesuit was a theatricalisation of Portrait focusing on those aspects of the text which enlarged on Joyce’s education. In order to make the text accessible to those unfamiliar with Jesuitry, a chorus of nuns directed the audience and commented on the action. The play not only drew attention to the poetry of church liturgy (and especially the Litany of the Virgin, so important to the younger Joyce’s understanding of sexuality) but also to its role in learning about those aspects of language and of life which would feed the later poet/novelist’s oeuvre.

The show was mounted in arcade style, and began with a priest-led procession from the chapel and down the colonnades to a Lady Chapel in the cloisters. There the young Stephen pondered God, the universe and his place in it before being monstered by a pandybat wielding Fr. Dolan, while the audience was similarly whipped into shape by Mother Superior, Deirdre Gillespie (‘I want you standing very close together, but not so close I can’t put a piece of paper between you’, and in response to the cold, ‘offer it up’.

The Christmas dinner scene was staged around a huge oval table with audience invited to imagine themselves as visitors. Stephen was an overgrown lad with a winning smile (played by Niall McCann), so it was hard to watch it being erased by political debate that divided his family. David Adamson played a mischievous Dedalus, Jimmy Shaw a heart-broken Uncle Charles, and Renee Huish a truculent and tormented Dante.

Director, Karen Corbett, staged the next few scenes in the oratory with a dancer/actor, Claire Haywood in the roles of Tramgirl/ Prostitute/Birdgirl. Her Pina-Bausch-inspired prostitute played with the knicker-bockered Stephen as if he were a rag doll. She represented the evolving female fantasy of Stephen. Both her prostitute and birdgirl dances were accompanied by Francesca Mountford playing on cello her own composition. Birdgirl had sung accompaniment performed by David Adamson.

Bill Johnston doubled as Father Dolan and also as the sermonizer, and again the emphasis was on the poetics of terror, the sermons as act of imagination. Fr. Conmee’s attempted seduction of Stephen was subtly rendered by Jimmy Shaw and reached its climax in the choir loft of the Newman chapel.

The finale occurred in the oratory where Stephen and Cranly (Liam Gillespie) battled it out in a tense scene over whether or not he should do his Easter duty to assuage the suffering of a dying mother. The final scene, difficult to script because of the way in which chapter five becomes a series of quite arcane epiphanies, involved the entire cast offering blank pages to mark Stephen’s escape from the nets of constraint.

Patrons commented that the dramatization evoked memories they thought they had successfully repressed.

4.00pm: Seminar: Joyce and the Jesuits, Oratory

Professor Greg Dening: ‘Joyce and the Soul of Irish Jesuitry’
An ethnographic account of Jesuit Spirituality in the early twentieth century

A./Prof. Richard O’Sullivan: ‘Alluding to James Joyce - not as a Catholic but as a Jesuit’

Drawing upon paradoxes in Jesuit ethos and practice and in the life of John Conmee, the Jesuit who played the enabling role in Joyce's education.

Prof. Peter Steele: ‘A Poem and its Pendant’, Reflections on Belvedere and Joyce.

The seminar involved three stellar performances and a lively question and answer session. There were some interesting thematic links between Prof. Dening’s ethnography of spirituality and Peter Steele’s poem and his exegesis of it. In addition, Dening talked feelingly of his time as a Jesuit and the repellant office of pandy-batterer. Dr. Richard O’Sullivan’s research led him to investigate Fr. Conmee’s history and also the time he spent in Australia writing a report on Jesuit education in Australia. He emerged as a more complex character than he is depicted in Joyce’s novel.

We expect to be able to announce soon where these papers have been published.

8.00 Evening Performance (repeat of Matinee) of Jejune Jesuit.