For the first time since the COVID pandemic, GLAS returned last night to where it all began twenty years ago in the wood-lined Aula in the Collège des Coudriers.
In an echo of that Joycean-themed first night in January 2005, we gathered last night to celebrate James Joyce again, and the greatest novel of the 20th century, Ulysses, set on June 16, 1904 – known now forever as Bloomsday.
In his one-man show, ‘Blooming Ulysses’, Gerry Farrell brought to life brilliantly Joyce’s great anti-hero, Leopold Bloom, the wandering Jew of Dublin, full of good humour, common sense and a mind marbled with Joyce’s own jaundiced opinions of early 20th century Ireland, a colony of both the British Empire and the Catholic Church.
In a startling feat of memory, Farrell mesmerised the audience in the opening sequence with a bombastic treatise on the universality of water and its passage from the Roundwood Reservoir through Dublin’s pipes as he turned on a tap and filled a kettle. A similar pedantic but comic pantomime precedes his efforts to light a fire.
A centrepiece of the evening was the scene in Barney Kernan’s pub where Bloom comes face-to-face with the Citizen, an overblown, antisemitic, bigoted avatar of Irish nationalism who delivers some of the funniest lines in the whole of Ulysses as he casts aspersions on all things British and shows scant regard for the French, “never worth a roasted fart to Ireland.”
With few props, Farrell did a brilliant job summoning up the dark interior of the pub, the Dublin equivalent of the Cyclops cave, complete with flowing pints of porter, and never skipped a beat as he switched from character to character.
“Force, hatred, history, all that,” says Bloom, refusing to be intimidated by the Citizen’s bellicose rhetoric. “That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.” Asked what he is referring to, Bloom replies simply: “Love…I mean the opposite of hatred.”
Speaking of love, the evening opened with a delightful rendition of the song that reverberates throughout the book, ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ by Gillian Barmes – well known to fans of the Geneva English Drama Society – who comes from the very Joycean milieu of Glasnevin, with its famous cemetery where Bloom is somewhat puzzled by the rites and rituals of Catholic funerals.
All in all, it was a great evening, which ended with a standing ovation for Gerry Farrell and proceeds of CHF 6,400 to support the work of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, which has lost 48 staff and volunteers, killed in the conflict that broke out in October 2023.