Solas

Solas is Diane Stubbings’ finely written, intricate drama about Lucia Joyce (1907 – 1982) here played by Tenielle Thompson.  Lucia was a dancer and the troubled only daughter of author James Joyce.  Several authors and playwrights, intrigued by Lucia, have preceded Stubbings, but her Lucia is a striking, disturbing, and plausible creation. 

The task is made even more difficult because Lucia Joyce has been rendered virtually invisible: a few photographs and some press clippings are all that’s left.  Her brother and nephew somehow spirited her letters - from, to, or about her – as well as her poetry and a novel - out of the National Library of Ireland in 1988 and destroyed the lot.  You have to wonder what there was to hide about a woman who had died six years earlier after being incarcerated in mental hospitals since 1935.

The play is set in 1935, when Lucia (, known in the text simply as ‘L’) visits cousins in Bray, in Ireland.  She is on the eve of a complete breakdown: she will be committed by her brother later that same year to an insane asylum.  What we see is a tragic figure, a thwarted but immensely talented dancer and choreographer (by all contemporary accounts), a pioneer of ‘modern dance’, but living ‘in the shadow’ of her famous father and profoundly ambivalent about him (as he was about her profession), forever locked in violent conflict with her jealous, resentful mother, Nora, and serially disappointed in love.  

Here, she is thrown into sharp relief in dialogue with her cousin ‘B’ (Mariska Murphy), necessarily an invention by Stubbings, but a nicely judged dramatic device.  B is, of course, a good, sheltered Catholic girl and the perfect foil for L.  She’s curious,  questioning, naïve, an easily shocked, but kindly, gentle adversary.  There is much terrific dialogue between the two, with a lovely Irish lilt from B and a sharp ‘citizen of nowhere’ cosmopolitan edge from L.  Even as things grow darker, there is plenty of humour in their exchanges.  In one sequence, L persuades B to ‘be’ her while she’ll be B – and say what B is thinking.  With mortifying accuracy, L pins romantic but virginal B’s fear of sex – while B squirms and blushes. 

Believably, B comes to care for L, the fierce, angry, provocative, destructive, and self-destructive woman who had spent her twenties in Paris, had been on the stage as a dancer all over Europe and had had a string of famous lovers.   The woman who defiantly said, no doubt with reference to her father, ‘C’est moi qui est l’artiste.’  But now, in scarcely glamorous Bray, she’s in a downward spiral, going down fighting, but as if already defeated, alcoholic, and prone to starting fires.  And the play asks us, was she mentally ill or, given her family, the strictures, conventions, and prejudices of her time, horribly blocked and frustrated – or just ‘difficult’?

Director Lynda Fleming has cast well and gets excellent performances from her two actors.  Tenielle Thompson is a fount of rage, irony, and sarcasm as dark, sharp, brittle, mocking L, and Mariska Murphy is a sweet, soft, big-eyed confidante, the helpless witness to L’s decline.  If there is any flaw in either writing or performance it is perhaps the lack of emphasis on L’s physicality, that is, her dancing – she may be washed up, but she was a dancer.

Solas plays out on the restored La Mama stage – and thank the Lord, it just as small, just as intimate as in the past.  It is a wonder: here, two women, two chairs, a bottle of champagne, some period costumes, Shane Grant’s lighting and we have theatre.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Sarah Walker