Seeing Riverrun again

I loved Olwen Fouéré' s Riverrun in Dublin last year, and went to see it again on Saturday, at the Shed on the South Bank, by the mighty River Thames, another great river setting.   

Father Thames on a lamp post in front of the theatre

Entering the South Bank, it was nice to see this blackboard, asking audience members to share the most meaningful word of the show.

In Dublin, Olwen had a deep wide stage, and performed to the audience face on. In the Shed, she has a smaller but higher space. The audience sits on either side and in front of her, and we got less of Stephen Dodd's lighting design.

When I saw the piece in Dublin, I thought it was a straight adaptation of the final chapter. In London, I realised she's included passages from other parts of the Wake. I recognised the last bit of the Shem the Penman chapter, pages 193-5 (which I had to read aloud in Sweny the Chemist's last year). At the end, Shaun 'points the deathbone and the quick are still' but Shem the artist 'lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.
— Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!'

It's echoed in the final chapter, on page 595: 'Death banes and the quick quoke. But life wends and the dombs spake.' 

In Riverrun, Olwen gave us a good 'Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!'

Photo by Colm Hogan. Here she's whispering some of the text from St Patrick and the Druid, p611

THE EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

I spotted another passage from page 26, in the book's opening chapter:

Your heart is in the system of the Shewolf and your crested head is in the tropic of Copricapron. Your feet are in the cloister of Virgo. Your olala is in the region of sahuls. And that’s ashore as you were born. Your shuck tick’s swell. And that there texas is tow linen. The loamsome roam to Laffayette is ended. Drop in your tracks, babe! Be not unrested ! The headboddylwatcher of the chempel of Isid, Totumcalmum, saith: I know thee, metherjar, I know thee, salvation boat.

This comes from the bit where the fallen hodcarrier Tim Finnegan, who is also the giant Finn MacCool, is trying to rise up out of his coffin at his wake, and the mourners are telling him to stay dead ('Now be aisy Mr Finnimore sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don't be walking abroad.' 24.16).  In the passage quoted above, they're using Ancient Egyptian spells for the same purpose.  

A hymn addressed to Ptah Tanen declares that his head is in the heavens while his feet are on the earth or in Duat, the underworld. "The wind", declared the priestly poet, "issues from thy nostrils and the waters from thy mouth. Upon thy back grows the grain. The sun and the moon are thine eyes. When thou dost sleep it is dark, and when thou dost open thine eyes it is bright again."

Donald Mackenzie, Egyptian Myth and Legend, 1907 

The last Wake sentence above is based on a hymn to Osiris in the Book of the Dead ('Osiris Ra, triumphant, saith...'). A 'headboddylwatcher' is a canopic jar and 'Totumcalmum' is Tutankhamen and totally calmed.

'Headboddylwatchers' - head bottle watchers, or canopic jars

There's a lot of Ancient Egyptian stuff in the final chapter.  At the beginning, we get this passage, which Olwen recited:

The eversower of the seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the domnatory of Defmut after the night of the carrying of the word of Nuahs and the night of making Mehs to cuddle up in a coddlepot, Pu Nuseht, lord of risings in the yonderworld of Ntamplin, tohp triumphant, speaketh. 593.20-4

The bringer of light to the souls in the dormitory of the deafmute, after the night of Shaun and Shem, the Sunrise, lord of risings in the underworld of Dublin, triumphant, speaks. 

In other words, the rising Sun triumphantly speaks to, and wakes, the sleepers of Finnegans Wake.

That's another parody of the Book of the Dead, which has 'The overseer of the house of the overseer of the seal, Nu, triumphant, saith.' Joyce has reversed words to make up Egyptian-sounding names - 'Nuahs' and 'Mehs' are Shaun and Shem. 'Pu Nuseht' is the Sun Up. 'Ntamplin' is a version of Dublin and 'tohp' is light (Greek 'photo').

The passage announces the big theme of the final chapter - waking up 'after the night' of the book. In Chapter One, Finnegan is told to stay asleep; in the final chapter, he's told to wake up ('Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!' 619.25).

The Ancient Egyptian name for the Book of the Dead was 'Chapters of Coming Forth by Day', which also describes the end of Finnegans Wake.

I loved the way that Olwen physically enacted the rising of the sun, raising it up like a balloon above her, and spinning round to see a shaft of light: 'Lok! A shaft of shivery in the act, anilancinant. Cold's sleuth!'

Joyce's 'salvation boat'? Ra represented by the scarab and the red disc, in the solar barque (boat)

Imagine that solar disk as a bar of Sunlight Soap. 
 

A DIFFERENT JOURNEY EVERY NIGHT

Finnegans Wake turns the reader, or theatregoer, into a creator of meaning. Joyce told Adolph Hofmeister that his book could 'satisfy more readers than any other book because it gives them the opportunity to use their own ideas in the reading'.

In a great article for Exeunt magazine Olwen describes some of the elements that she found in the text:

Finn MacCool and Foyn MacHooligan, cartoon-like heroes, music-hall gags, a giant body and its cosmic counterpart, the constellation of Orion, Ursa Major, the Egyptian book of the dead, various characters – celestial, human, animal, vegetal and mineral – hover. They emerge and morph on rhythms as subversive and agile as Charlie Chaplin.  In fact, I am sure he must be in there somewhere. As is, without a doubt, the voice of Lucia, Joyce’s incarcerated daughter, with her silenced rage, her dancer’s brilliance and the multilingual fire of her wit. I am sure I can hear her, waking our silence, making us laugh. 

Riverrun is a show to see again and again, because, as an audience member you pick up on different elements, and find fresh meanings.

It's also different for Olwen every night: 'The river leads the way, a sound-dance of revolutionary energy, and it is impossible to surf it like an expert....We author our own way down the river, along with our audience, on a different journey each and every night.'

Going out, I photographed Olwen's footprints in the salt crystals on the floor

and wrote 'leafy' on the blackboard

 

Olwen Fouéré's Riverrun

For Joyceans, the best thing that happened in 2012 was that the great man's works came out of copyright. For years, Joyce’s estate, run by his cantankerous grandson, Stephen, has tried hard to stop people quoting from, performing, or even reading his books in public. All this has now changed, and this year I've seen three fine stage productions of his works.

I was in Dublin at the weekend for the Theatre Festival, where Olwen Fouéré performed Riverrun at the Project Theatre. This is her adaptation of the final book of Finnegans Wake, which she acts out, through the voice of the River Liffey.

She performs on a deep wide stage, with a central microphone on a bending stand, the lead twisting away to the left rear corner of the stage. To the right of the lead, the floor is covered with salt crystals, giving the impression of the bank and river. She begins by taking off her shoes and stepping over the microphone lead onto the salt, into the water.

Fouéré then speak-sings the final chapter, from which she has cut out the dialogues and set pieces (St Kevin, Muta and Juva, St Patrick and the Druid). By removing them, using only the framing narrative and the final monologue, she creates a strong sense of a single voice in a flowing river of words. 

The central idea running though the last chapter is of waking up, after the long night of the book. 'Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne' - a call to everyone lying down to rise up with the day: 'Passing. One. We are passing. Two. From sleep we are passing. Three. Into the wikeawades warld from sleep we are passing. Four. Come, hours, be ours!'

The sense becomes clearer when we reach the final monologue, the only part of the book actually spoken by the river, Anna Liffey, as she flows out of Dublin to die in the Irish Sea.

The Liffey from Sean Heuston Bridge

As she speaks these words, Fouéré moves rhythmically, rolling her shoulders as if she is swimming. The movements grow bigger as she gets nearer the choppy waters of Dublin Bay. The watery sense is strengthened by Stephen Dodd's lighting and Almer Kellaher's soundscape, which builds throughout the monologue.

The first part is spoken to her husband, who is the fallen giant Finnegan and the city of Dublin stretched out beside her: 'Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!' She calls on him to dress, and to join her. But he never replies. She's aware that she's being replaced in the water cycle by a younger river, 'a daughterwife from the hills...Swimming in my hindmoist.' This reminds her of her own youth when she fell, as rain, out of her mother, the sky:

The younger river, upstream at Chapelizod

'Now a younger's there.Try not to part! Be happy, dear ones! May I be wrong! For she'll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother.  My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It's something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come.'

At the end, as the Liffey approaches the vast sea she grows disillusioned with her husband, the city (' I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny.'). Flowing into the sea is a death for the river, and a return to her father, the cold sea:
 

Looking upstream from the O'Connell Bridge

'I am passing out. O bitter ending! And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms....A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the' 

With the final 'the' Fouéré's face freezes in the light, suspended like the sentence, which will continue on the book's opening page ('riverrun past Eve and Adam's...') Finnegans Wake never ends.

Riverrun is an astonishing achievement, and it was wonderful to see it a stone's throw from

Olwen Fouéré by the Liffey after the show

the Liffey. It was the right time of year too, Autumn, when the Liffey is carrying leaves down to the sea ('I am leafy speafing').  The leaves are the pages of the book, which drift away one by one, until, on the last page Anna Livia says, 'My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still.'

After the show, we went down to the Liffey and joined Olwen for drinks on the Millennium Bridge. I asked her how difficult it was to learn the text. She said, 'I found I just knew it!'

Then we finished the evening in the Oval (where Simon Dedalus drinks with his cronies in Ulysses) before heading back to Wynn's Hotel (which gets two mentions in Ulysses and three in Finnegans Wake).

Joycean Heaven!

In 2022, Olwen recorded the closing pages with her long-term musical collaborator, Roger Doyle, 'the godfather of Irish electronic music' (Donal Fallon)