On the Town: It was as if a day in 1904 was revived in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin this week. Actors dressed as Leopold and Molly Bloom, strolled through the crowd at a party to launch the ReJoyce Dublin 2004 festival.
This is the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, that fictitious June 16th day famously recounted in Ulysses. The festival will celebrate James Joyce's literary masterpiece over five months.
It will set about "giving people the building blocks to allow them feel more comfortable reading the texts," says Laura Weldon, national co-ordinator of the festival. "It's a support system for everybody. It's about getting people to the texts, helping people appreciate and approach Joyce whether through art, drama, music, whatever the mechanism."
In addition to exhibitions and events, the festival will offer street theatre, music programmes and family entertainment.
Joycean scholar Senator David Norris believes Joyce was "a really wonderful and illuminating person. He has enriched my life and given me an awful lot of travel".
Having met people in Trieste, Zurich and Paris who knew the writer, Norris says he has learned through their reflections that Joyce was "quite shy and absorbed in his work, endlessly kind. He would remember your birthday. He was very manipulative and exploitative - because he was absolutely driven. That's what lies behind his heroic stature. Nothing came before his works. He would expect everyone to drop everything else".
Photographer Tom Lawlor says an exhibition of work by 10 photographers "taking their influences from Joyce" will hang in the Blue Leaf Gallery in June. Brothers Redmond and Colclough Doran own Dublin's Davy Byrne's pub, where Leopold Bloom had a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of Burgundy at lunchtime. They are sponsoring a short story competition, in conjunction with The Irish Times and the James Joyce Centre, with €20,000 as the first prize, to mark the literary celebration.
Others at the reception included Glasthule fishmonger Peter Caviston in a Joycean outfit topped off with a straw boater, the Joycean looking Robert Nicholson, of the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove and actors Graham Boland as Bloom and Sarah Shiels as Molly Bloom. Shiels will direct Electra, which opens at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in March.
ReJoyce Dublin 2004 begins on Thursday, April 1st. www.rejoycedublin2004.com