BLOOMSDAY IN MELBOURNE
2025 Circe's Carnival of Vice
Joyce's Surreal Psychodrama
Adapted from Ulysses by the Bloomsday in Melbourne Scripting Team
Welcome to Nighttown, and to Joyce's most radical and subversive foray into the most intimate inner hopes, dreams, fears and neuroses of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus​​
How was Circe's Carnival of Vice Received?
Sexuality on steroids! Gender bending and a hallucinatory trip are the focus of Bloomsday in Melbourne’s playful, highly original work, Circe’s Carnival of Vice... It is fun, fanciful and frivolous... Extraordinary costuming by Zachary Dixon, ... which I couldn’t get enough of...
Alex First, The Blurb
Patrons' Responses
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What a delicious, bawdy, fever dream of a show! I'm sure Joyce aficionados would have a whole other level of appreciation but I loved the theatricality, staging, use of music and movement. Congratulations director Wayne Pearn, an absolute triumph!
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Wayne' Pearn’s extravaganza was off the wall....It was out there, clever, playful, dark, funny - and the cast were WONDERFUL.
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... faithful to the text. The seminar papers were great, especially Manuella Hrasky. Interesting, and works well to have history and background for the play.
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Astonishingly brilliant!Exceptional casting and direction! Over-the-top gorgeously gifted energetic actors! Magnificent costumes, choreography, staging, lighting, music! Dublin 'revealing all' - I've never seen anything like it!
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Truly 'an adaptation of the most outrageous episode of James Joyce's 'Ulysses'
The 2025 Seminar
The Seminarians: Manuela Hrasky and Daniel Boyle
Chair: Frances Devlin-Glass
Dr Manuela Hrasky, F.R.A.N.Z.C.P.
'James Joyce And The New Sexology'
As James Joyce was growing up in the late 19th Century, the scientific study of sexuality was being pioneered by thinkers like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. Against the prevailing repressiveness of the Victorian era, these trailblazers explored sexual development and relationships, homosexuality, gender identity, masturbation, fetishism and the ‘perversions’ such as sadism and masochism. We know that Joyce, the committed iconoclast and experimental writer who revealed his sexual precociousness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was aware of the work of these psychologists, and in the Circe episode of Ulysses he brought to life a catalogue of case studies like theirs through his merciless exposition of the fears and fantasies of his everyman hero, Leopold Bloom. What can we glean from the Circe episode about Joyce and his relationship to this revolution in sexual psychology? Was he a ‘pervert’? A ‘degenerate’? Did he have an unhealthy interest in what Freud called ‘polymorphous perversity’? Or did he embrace it as a way to further his project of writing ‘an epic of the body’? How should history view him? As an idiosyncratic genius – a man out of time – or an emancipator of desire who helped pave the way for sexual liberation, gender fluidity, and body positivity?
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Daniel Boyle, Thespian and Joycean
'The End of Monto'
2025 marks the hundredth anniversary of the closure of Monto, Dublin's infamous brothel district that is the setting for Circe's Carnival of Vice. Dan introduces us to the social history of the women who worked there, the often dangerous conditions they worked in, and how Joyce used his own personal knowledge of Dublin's brothels in his 'walk on the wild side.'
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