“Dubliners Dilemma” and “Welcome O Joyce” June 13, 2024 St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts
To celebrate Bloomsday 2024, the JJAO invited Irish actor/director/playwright Declan Gorman to launch his three-city Canadian tour (Ottawa, Hamilton and Toronto) featuring two of his one-man plays.
The first, “Dubliners Dilemma,” highlights the difficult choice Joyce’s publisher faced on whether to risk obscenity charges by publishing Joyce’s first book. As he rereads the manuscript of Dubliners, some of the stories come to life on the stage, with Declan playing the roles of truants and perverts, housemaids and barflies. Declan has performed the play across Ireland and abroad, but this was the premiere for Canada.
The second performance of the evening was a new play written by Declan in partnership with Des Gunning. The James Joyce Centre Dublin in partnership with James Joyce Association of Ottawa commissioned “Welcome O Joyce” as a broad retrospective of the world Joyce created in his four great prose works: Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. In keeping with the 85th anniversary of Finnegans Wake, Declan’s performance highlighted the “Mamalujo” passage which first appeared in print as a “Work in Progress” a hundred years ago this year.
