What's On

We regret that this centenary event is another casualty of Covid. All is not lost: a film of the show is being made. Watch this space for the release date at Villa Alba. All purchased tickets will be honoured. For more information, see www.bloomsdayinmelbourne.org.au

James Joyce's Ulysses is 100, and we're still becoming his contemporaries. Bloomsday in Melbourne invites you to celebrate the centenary with an immersive new play, 'Love's Bitter Mystery', which tackles the question of how a literary nobody became the sensation of his age and of modernity. It focuses on the year that made James Joyce, 1903-4. The year in which James Joyce learnt what love is and how to love. This year was a crucial period in his development, as a writer but more importantly as a man. He and his mother had a very close relationship, but he felt trapped by everything she represented: family, conventional morality, religion, duty. She taught him what it is to love – but cruelly, it took her death to free him to love her without being bound by everything she demanded from him.

Miserable with grief, poverty and the lack of any apparent future, Joyce’s fortunes took a turn for the better when in June 1904 he met a young woman on the streets of Dublin. Nora Barnacle had achieved so much that Joyce had failed to achieve: exile – for her, from Galway, and escape to the big city – and not only financial independence but an independence of behaviour, too.

The play is set in the glorious boom mansion, Villa Alba, in Kew, and its faded grandeur adds texture and resonance to what is gothic in this script, and romantic.

The play is written by Steve Carey and  Associate Director, Carly Ellis, ('Voyage' at fortyfivedownstairs) will work alongside Jennifer Sarah Dean (Australian director of 'Moulin Rouge'), implementing her concept and design.

Bloomsday is excited to share Joyce's story in this new immersive play.

For more information about times and sessions, see www.bloomsdayinmelbourne.org.au