Bloomsday at Kobe College 2003



A letter from Frances Devlin-Glass at Kobe College,
where she was Visiting Professor at the English Department from March 2003 to March 2004

Mounting Bloomsday with Japanese speakers of English, for whom it is a second language, was a huge challenge. First, there was the issue of making Joyce's language comprehensible to the actors, and after them the audience. Secondly, there is practically no Joyce cultural baggage to rely on ('who's he when he's at home?'), and an anticipated student audience. As well, there is my lack of Japanese and not knowing where to go for costume hire (my students and I could not easily locate such shops in Kobe or Osaka), or specialist film, or any one of a number of other things (paint for props, the right quality paper for posters etc when items are labeled in Japanese exclusively!)

Fortunately, I had excellent support in the persons of Kerstan Cohen, and the students at Kobe College, to a person, are amazingly reliable: they need to be told only once, and providing they understand the request, it is as good as done. It took me a while to realize how general a virtue this was! But I was immensely grateful for their thoughtful and cooperative responsiveness. They are also great learners, and many students who had no direct interest in Joyce, or literary studies, got into the action, simply for the learning experience it represented for them. Such hunger for experience and education is again amazing to experience. Because of the meticulous attitude to direction, not a single entrance or exit was fluffed, and delivery of lines was always timely, if at times rather more tentative than in rehearsal.

Working with exclusively women students in a Christian Women's University (Kobe College, Nishinomiya), it seemed to make sense to work with Gerty and Molly, and to use Joyce's attitudes to the commodification of romance and marriage as unifying themes. We were also able to draw on some male staff, so it was strategic to include Doran and Blazes. Bloom, unhappily, dropped out of view, except as a vital figure in Molly's memories. This had as much to do with shortage of male personnel as wanting to use as many students as possible.

At first, I devised scripts that were far too long, and the dejected faces at the first rehearsal sent me to the cutting room. Another challenge was the maidenly modesty of Kobe College students: they are not used to being larger than life, to being outrageous and melodramatic. Such behaviours are, of course, generally speaking anathema to Japanese people. The way around was found by one of the staff here, Kerstan Cohen, who suggested that Gerty (Naomi Kure) become a kind of puppet, responsive to the promptings of the voices in her head derived from advertising, romance and gossip, and that these be externalized by a puppeteer-like narrator. So, a very comic routine was worked out whereby she was jerked into action by particular cues and overdid the gamut of her emotions: vanity, self-pity, erotic desires.

The dinner entertainment, devised by Philip Harvey, will take us back 70 years to Joyce’s death and its aftermath.

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The decision to dress most of the women in yukata was very popular with the students, and as we rehearsed, the congruence between 1904 Dublin maidenly modesty and covert eroticism, and contemporary Japanese mores became empowering. This decision led to others in which the action was Japanised: Baby Boardman and Jacky Caffrey were metamorphosed into huge cutesy cartoons used at school crossings here. Japanese people are especially fond of huge fireworks displays, so we spared no effort on the animated and audio dimensions of the Powerpoint which accompanied the performances, and Tommy Caffrey's excitement was signaled in Japanese.

So, the event, which took place on 18 June in the late afternoon, took the form of four items: a selection from Gerty, a set of monologues based on ’The Boarding House’, Blazes buying his fruit for his tryst, and a romantic Molly ( a selection of passages from the end of her monologue).

The three graduate students who are studying Joyce had become interested in 'The Boarding House', and Polly seemed a pointed counterpart for Gerty, offering a more critical view of the marriage market. Our Mrs. Mooney and Doran were members of faculty (Cyndie Seton and Paul Maeker respectively), as was the narrator, and Gerty was a graduate student, Kae Okita. Mrs Mooney was truly evil, hair in tight bun, eyes gleaming with malice and intent. Doran looked the part in braces and did an almost fatherly (!) routine when Polly announced her suicidal intentions. Polly, however, was fabulous as the duplicitous, scheming girl who can get lost in her makeup and reveries, almost forgetting that her nuptials are being arranged below stairs. It was a strong performance from a young woman who is by nature very shy.