2018 HOLY COW!

JAMES JOYCE SLAUGHTERS THE SACRED COWS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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DIRECTED BY JENNIFER SARAH DEAN AT FORTYFIVEDOWNSTAIRS, 45 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE

Holy Cow! adapts for theatre the 14th chapter of Ulysses – Oxen of the Sun. By 1919, when it was written, Joyce was experimenting with the style of each chapter ever more radically. As well as telling the story of Mina's difficult delivery, and Bloom's loss of his own child, Joyce's narrative imitates and parodies the styles of upwards of 34 literary periods, beginning with Irish, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, tracking through medieval morality plays and fantastical travel narratives, continuing via Arthurian song cycle, Bunyan’s allegories and Elizabethan chronicles, moving into early seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels and comedies of manners, then into early gothic romance and romantic excess, making a detour into history and science before arriving at Dickens and Ruskin, and then wallowing in the breakdown of English into slang and regional peculiarities in the early twentieth century. 

 This production highlighted the different styles of each period with 6 major costume changes and by gestural mannerisms which were governed by Joyce's language.