`For my brother," wrote Stanislaus Joyce of the James Joyce of a century ago, "the drama had become a thing of supreme importance, what the Mass had been." Because his one play, Exiles, is a relative failure, it is easy to forget that religious devotion and the centrality of the theatre to Joyce's emergence as an artist. It was Henrik Ibsen who convinced him that he could be a European writer. It was the work of actresses such as Eleonora Duse, Stella Campbell and Olga Nethersole that convinced him the Victorian distinction between the spiritual and the sexual was greatly exaggerated. At one stage in his life, what he most wanted to be was a great playwright. Given his spectacular mastery of other forms, his failure to fulfil that ambition is all the more tantalising.
It's not, therefore, all that surprising that a play such as Tom Gallacher's perennial Mr Joyce Is Leaving Paris, running until the end of the month at the Samuel Beckett Centre in Dublin, retains a certain attraction. Hovering around it somewhere is a good idea, some notion of using Joyce's life as a way of exploring the relationship between theatre and life.
What is surprising, though, is how little it makes of that idea. For a play that has held its place on the Irish stage for three decades and also had a couple of airings on television, it is remarkably poor. Only the continuing elan of Joyce's name can explain its survival.
Its first act deals with Joyce the would-be playwright, returning drunkenly from a night at the theatre, discussing Ibsen, Synge, Eleonora Duse, Hamlet, acting styles and the Abbey, with his brother Stanislaus. The act ends with Joyce beginning to write a play. If this has the claustrophobic feel of a dramatist contemplating drama when he should be contemplating the world, it at least holds out the promise that with all this theatrical talk we will eventually get to some theatrical point.
Somewhere between the two acts, however, Gallacher apparently decided that instead of a play about the theatre, he wanted to write a play about Joyce. So, 31 years later, we get Joyce surrounded by the shades of people whose lives he has used to make his books. They are, in theory, four characters in search of an author, but, in fact they become, with Joyce himself, five characters in search of a play. Bits of biography are rather ploddingly translated into dialogue. No opportunity for artistic name-dropping - Beckett, Picasso - is lost. And none of it is transformed into anything approaching a play. Having started out as an apparent exploration of theatre, the piece ends as a negation of it.
The trouble with Mr Joyce Is Leaving Paris is that it is insufficiently hypocritical. The charge that Tom Gallacher levels, rather crudely, against Joyce is that he exploited other people's lives for the sake of his art: the Joyce of the play is a tyrant who appropriates human reality and transforms it into the stuff of great writing.
It would be ironic if Gallacher had done the same with Joyce's own life, plundering it for the materials out of which to construct an autonomous work of art. But that is what great artists do, and there are worse things than irony - dullness, for instance. The price of Gallacher's lack of hypocrisy is a play whose meagre stature is made all the more obvious by being placed in the context of Joyce's towering achievement.
More successful appropriations of Joyce than Gallacher's - in Tom Stoppard's play Travesties or Flann O'Brien's novel The Dalkey Archive, for instance - are also a good deal less indebted to the facts of biography. They steal Joyce's name most shamelessly. They create a character and then call it James Joyce. Gallacher works the other way around, taking the known facts of Joyce's life and trying to construct a character out of them. He doesn't manage it.
The saving grace of Ronan Wilmot's production for the Dublin Theatre Company is that Luke Griffin, as Joyce, comes close to doing the playwright's job. There are things he cannot do - such as, for instance, make it credible that the Joyce who arrives falling-down drunk at the beginning of the play is talking coherently about complex subjects within a few minutes. But what can be done is achieved with considerable style: ageing more than 30 years between acts; creating a persona in which extremes of arrogance and vulnerability can co-exist; and giving a convincing embodiment to the play's best line - "I have waged literature like a war".
Other than providing a fierce challenge for a very good young actor, though, it is hard see the point of the production. When the play was written first, it could be argued that Joyce was, especially in his native city, a neglected figure and that simply putting bits of his life on stage was a significant statement. Now that he has become a metropolitan icon, an upmarket Molly Malone, theatrical biography runs the risk of being confused with literary tourism. It is a risk that, in reviving a play best laid to rest, the Dublin Theatre Company has done little to avoid.
