- James Joyce’s “Dubliners” performed and produced by Wonderland Productions Limited
Ever since Hugh Kenner’s Joyce’s Voices and since serious attention was paid to the work of M. M. Bakhtin, there has been an awareness of the polyphonic nature of Joyce’s Dubliners and of the multiplicity of “parts” that the work assigns, a diversity to some extent controlled by their spatial and temporal specificity.1 The Dublin-based Wonderland Productions and its artistic director Alice Coghlan have thus taken a valid approach to the work by using the voices of many different actors in this “adaptation,” in contrast to recordings that have just one reader throughout or even recordings assigning entire stories to different readers. What Wonderland presents here is more like a dramatization of the text than any prior recordings, so it is not directly comparable to them.
This project arose out of the audio walking guide that Wonderland produced for the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which enabled visitors to tour the city and hear snatches of the stories at relevant locations. Following the success of that initiative, the company has now produced this “stand-alone” version of the work on three CDs.
It is in no sense a faithful rendering of the book called Dubliners: “Araby,” “After the Race,” “Clay,” “Ivy Day,” and “A Mother” are omitted entirely, while all the remaining stories receive cuts and even suffer the indignity of having their words altered, for instance, when pronouns are replaced by proper names or when a revision has led [End Page 1121] to a need for clarification—though also sometimes for more obscure reasons. Worst of all is the treatment meted out to “Grace,” which has been reduced to a manageable 2.56 minutes in length by ending the action just after Mr. Kernan’s rescue in the pub. Whatever the constraints on the company—including the fact that the project had its origins in a circumscribed walking guide—they have left their mark. There is no justification for this approach; it would have been far better to have omitted the story altogether. Certainly the producers cannot be accused of excessive reverence for this author.
As a dramatization, the recording includes the full panoply of sound effects—street cries, gulls, music, barroom noises, and other urban sounds. Generally, these work well: I liked, for instance, hearing “The Lass of Aughrim” played very softly on a piano at the ending of “The Dead.” This is using the audio medium to best advantage. Nowhere did the sound effects seem excessively intrusive.
Listening to a work that one is accustomed to hearing in one’s own head (and probably all Joyceans have their own mental voicings of these stories) can sometimes lead to surprising results. I was certainly given a new, unexpected perspective on the phrase at the start of “The Sisters,” which refers to the “deadly work” of paralysis (D 9). In the argot of Dublin youth at present, “deadly” means the very best, the supreme good: “that was a deadly film,” for example. It had never occurred to me before, and I hope it never will again, that this was the same word used in “The Sisters,” but hearing it from the mouth of a child actor with a strong Dublin accent, the association proved irresistible. If nothing else, it showed that the process of semantic diffusion is beyond the control even of James Joyce. And there were similar disconcerting moments throughout the experience of hearing this production.
Both “The Sisters” and “An Encounter” are rendered somewhat problematic by the use of young female actors to represent the voice of the boy at the center of the stories. The girls (Sarah Bradley and Caroline O’Boyle) are extremely responsive to the boy’s consciousness, but the sense of a fundamental discrepancy remains (and, it must be said, the Dublin accent is probably a bit stronger than would be appropriate for a boy of this background).
As the stories move into the adult world, they become more impressive: the pathos of “Eveline...