Behind the Scenes of Circe’s Carnival of Vice
Bloomsday in Melbourne’s Producer Steve Carey offers a glimpse behind the curtain of a brand new play, the staging of the notorious ‘Circe’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, set in Dublin’s dangerous brothel district, Monto.
Act One: Writers’ Conference
Setting: Zoom video conference, 8pm Thursday 29 August 2024 – 287 days to Opening Night
Led by Frances Devlin-Glass, Founder and Artistic Director of Bloomsday in Melbourne (hereafter BIM), the five-strong writing team rip into our draft script and discuss where we’re up to (scripting started in July 2023)… and how much there is still left to do. Each writer has taken on a scene to develop, and now we’re at work stitching those scenes painstakingly together. Can we make a pattern and get them all to fit?
It’s a daunting task, and it’s already been going on for months. At 150 pages, the episode we have chosen to stage is nearly as long as the first eight episodes of the book’s eighteen. But that by itself is not the issue – after all, BIM has presented the whole novel in a show previously. What is so challenging is that this is the episode in which, if you like, the book explodes. Every character we’ve met so far reappears, but now it’s nighttime and we are in a fever dream, with wrenching transformations and shifts in location, tone and direction. It’s a true ‘Walk On The Wild Side,’ befitting of a boozed up late night in the most lawless quarter of 1904 Dublin. It shouldn’t work on the page, yet it does. The question, though, is whether we can make it work on the stage. That’s what these lengthy Zoom sessions are all about.
Each scene is picked apart, challenged, interrogated, and the writer responsible tasked with, in many cases, shaving the scene yet further and ruthlessly reducing the dramatis personae. Cutting Joyce is a sobering experience, since every word is working hard. Someone comes up with an ingenious way to include Joyce’s bizarre ‘stage directions’: put them into the mouth of an on-the-scene newspaper reporter! The writers know a brilliant idea when they see it.
Bloom’s wife Molly is a challenge. She’s barely in this episode of the book, yet her presence hangs over everything. One of the team commits to finding passages from elsewhere in the book that can help flesh her out (and Molly is nothing if not flesh).
Two particularly thorny issues raise themselves once again. The first is technical, which is when and how to create our interval. Theatre wisdom says that you have a shorter second half, but our material won’t oblige. We make a decision, but put a pin in it to revisit.
The other issue is a bigger one, and one we’ve encountered many times before: Joyce’s sense of an ending. He can be relied upon to eschew a climactic conclusion to any of his works, instead opting for something quieter, ambivalent, lyrical – recall that gentle, moving conclusion to ‘The Dead,’ the last story in Dubliners, or the optimistic but awkward declaration by Stephen Dedalus at the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Our source episode, ‘Circe,’ presents just such a challenge. In context and with the heft of the text behind it, the quiet, whispered moment in which… no, I won’t give it away! But the ending is no curtain-dropper, and we wrestle once more with ways to bring out its significance for theatregoers, many of whom haven’t – yet! – read Ulysses in full. We find a solution we believe can work, but it’s asking a lot of our director and cast to sell it and send our audience out feeling something like the multiple conflicting emotions we’re aiming for.
Ah yes! The cast. We need one…
Act Two: Auditions
Setting: Kathleen Syme Library, 10am Monday 13 January 2025 – 150 days to opening night
We’ve whittled down more than 40 applications to about half that number, and now we have the challenge of finding our cast. Each actor has been given ‘sides,’ the page or pages that we’re going to see them go over. While auditioning is a key skill, it never gets easy, and the old adages about treating an audition as a chance to perform or as the first day of working on your character with the director may ring hollow for some. We feel for the actors, and recognise that some are better at auditions than others – but it’s all we have to go on, so we do.
At the end of a long, long day we spend an hour comparing notes, shuffling headshots and making the case for our own choices. The final say belongs to the director, who must not only pick the best but also take into account chemistry and how these actors will look together. We do not reach unanimity, but at least we have a cast. The exciting part is looking forward to working with these talented, energetic young talents. The much harder part is having to turn away many we know could play their parts magnificently. That never gets easier.
But there’s a bonus that excites us greatly! We’ve landed two terrific Dublin men, Eric Moran and Ryan Haran, in the roles of Bloom and Stephen Dedalus respectively.
Act Three: Rehearsals
Setting: 3ZZZ Community Radio Station, 6.30pm Tuesday 6 May 2025 – 37 days to Opening Night
It’s already been a long day already for some, and particularly for our Director, and now it’s time to launch into an evening’s rehearsal. They’ve been going on already for several weeks now, and in total we’ve scheduled approximately an hour per minute of performance.
Every director has a unique style, and Wayne, who’s directed for Bloomsday five times before, is fascinating to watch. The first read through of this evening’s scene is rough as guts. Then Wayne jumps up and says, in a characteristic drawl, ‘Let’s have a playyy, shall we?’ It doesn’t sound much, but it empowers the cast to give full rein to their creativity and try out their lines in strange and weird ways. As they repeat the scene, they are ‘blocking,’ which is to say working out their physical location in relation to each other and to the space. This process brings the scene to life and, almost imperceptibly, a shambles becomes… something promising, then rapidly enthralling and hilarious and poignant by turns. We’re lucky too to have Steve Gome, an experienced actor well known to Bloomsday, as dramaturg: he doesn’t say a whole lot but he sure as hell makes it count. He points out, for example, how in the line, “He wants my money and my life, for some brutish empire of his, brutish is a play on British, and suddenly we, and the actor playing him, see Stephen’s complaint and his attitude to the two bully boy soldiers in a new, more provocative light that helps to make their assault on him no less shocking, but more inevitable.
As this goes on, actors are called one by one to see Zac Dixon, our costumier, who must find ways to make the myriad characters stand out without turning this into a costume show, and give us a whole world with but the slightest of hints. Wayne has plumped decisively for a minimal set, which curiously makes it easier to ‘see’ the various settings more convincingly, and means that each little bit of costume carries greater significance, is there for a reason, evoking a whole new character.
When not needed, actors are busily learning specific pronunciations from Eric and Ryan. Dubliners, for instance, tend to call the street where the Blooms live not ‘Eccles’ street, to rhyme with freckles, but instead ‘Ecc-lez.’ Such touches may only be noticed by a handful of Joyceans and Dubliners, but it pleases us greatly to get such things bang on.
Meanwhile, Wayne has solved the interval issue! He points out that our strange world will lose atmosphere and momentum if we pause it, and makes the case for racing through without doing so. Not for the first time, his instinct is right.
There are 37 days until Opening night, and so much to do – marketing, lighting plot, props… But Circe’s Carnival of Vice is now a real, living thing with a strong heartbeat and a lusty scream. We look forward to wetting the baby’s head in June!
Circe’s Carnival of Vice opens at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, on Wednesday 11 June 2025 and plays until Sunday 22nd June. More information and ticket links at http://www.bloomsdayinmelbourne.org.au
Steve Carey
Steve is Producer of Circe’s Carnival of Vice, the Producer of the play, and Treasurer of Bloomsday in Melbourne. He was also the playwright of Samuel Beckett and the Rainbow Girl.
Tinteán 