David Parnell knows damn well that if most people in their 20s were asked to choose between a night at the movies, a comedy club or theatre they’d probably place theatre last. However, Guna Nua, the theatre company he co-founded with Paul Meade, is hell bent on breaking down that hierarchical structure and the boundaries that keep too many people from delighting in the incomparable thrills of the stage.
Like punk guerrillas moving in on the often stuffy world of academia, they’ve certainly upset some Joycean scholars with their new Thesis, which tells the tale of one day in the life of a student trying to get his Joyce thesis published. The life concept echoes Ulysses of course, but Joyce himself took that concept from Homer’s Odyssey. That’s one of the reasons David, one of the three writers of Thesis, feels it’s quite legitimate to take the same paradigm into the 21st century as a piece of theatre. But did they really have to choose a title that might frighten the shite – or to quote Joyce, shite and onions! – out of every student in the country?
“Well, we want to appeal to everybody, not just students!” he responds, laughing. “And we hope the title is intriguing actually, because the play is not just about this student trying to get his thesis published but the question of who creates ideas and who owns ideas once they are created, and in that way the play works on a metaphorical level because the thesis in question does centre around James Joyce. And there is a feeling out there that Joyce is owned by a whole range of people, particularly academics, that maybe he never meant to claim ownership of his work. So, overall, it’s about ownership, copyright, intellectual ideas, and that’s where the title came from.”
The day-in-the-life idea is, however, only very loosely based on Ulysses and, no, the pilgrim soul in question does not wander throughout Dublin in one particular day.
“He wanders to America and back,” Peter explains. “At least he gets the opportunity to travel to America to publish his thesis, and it all does take place in one day, but the specific journey he takes is slightly different in that he travels transatlantic and back. And actually Gerry Dukes, who is one of the authors of Thesis, is a lecturer on Joyce in the university of Limerick, so he has some direct experience of the academic world in this sense, though not as far as, say, the censorship that arises in this play and which we heighten for the sense of the drama.”
The play itself originally was meant to be part of the Joyce centenary, which is why Parnell and Meade asked Dukes to get involved, but “what started off as a dramatisation of Joyce and Joyce’s legacy has transmogrified into a more detached story” including a love triangle between a student, his professor and the professor’s wife. Sounds like fun!
“Actually, we hope it is!” admits Parnell. “Because even though the Joyce elements are still there, they are not as much to the forefront as we had first envisaged and we think that’s better because it means of you are not a Joyce scholar or even well-read in relation to Joyce, you’ll still enjoy the play on its own level. But if you do know your Joyce, you’ll get the references, so we hope it works for both audiences as well. And, really, it doesn’t take itself that seriously. It’s meant to be enjoyed as a play, a drama, a simple love story about a young man and his married mistress, or the other levels.”
That said, David acknowledges that whereas “some people go for the Joyce references and really enjoy them, some don’t.” Especially those tight-asses who feel the work of James Joyce is sacrosanct.
“There is still that kind of snobbery in the sense of people who think it’s just not right to be adapting or utilising Joyce as we do in this play,” he says. “There is still that reverence towards his work and that it should remain untouchable. But I’d encourage the purists to see it to make their minds up. Our point is that Joyce should be available to everybody, and if anybody is encouraged to read Ulysses after seeing this play, then that’s a job well done on our behalf. And I really would like more people, in general, to give theatre a chance.”