A Rare Journey celebrates the life of truly remarkable Galwegian woman, Nora Joyce née Barnacle.
This 75-minuteplay scheduled for the Town Hall Theatre on Tuesday, May 13, will takes its audience through Nora’s extraordinary life, delighting in her razor-sharp and often lethal wit, and includes songs and music that the Joyces loved.
Written and performed by Paula Greevy-Lee, she says she is excited to bring her play to Nora’s family heartland in Galway city. Premiered in Cork in 2022, Greevy-Lee’s ambition is to tour the play to all the major locations associated with the Joyces, including Trieste, Paris, Rome, Zurich, Dublin and London.
The play separates Nora from her famous, literary alter ego Molly Bloom, and dispels the sometimes lazy myths that have often cast Nora as an inconsequential appendage of her famous husband, the writer James Joyce.
This is Nora’s story.
“He wants me to read his auld book, but sure no one in their right mind could make head nor tail of it...”
This one-woman show separates the funny, charming, wise, sharp-witted, complex, and compassionate Nora from the half-truths that have dogged her since her death aged 67 in 1951.
Beginning in 1946, five years after James Joyce’s death, we meet Nora as she prepares to meet a young American journalist for lunch in a café in Zurich. Wary of journalists and anxious about what questions she might be asked about life with her famous husband, Nora ‘rehearses’ for the encounter by retracing the exhilarating highs and best-left-unsaid lows of her extraordinary life since the fateful day in 1904 on Nassau Street when she locked eyes with the eager and cocky young man she was destined to spend her life with.
As they moved from city to city across Europe with their children Georgio and Lucia in tow, sometimes fleeing war and sometimes unpaid bills, Nora was the rock that enabled Jim to keep writing. She observes it all with a bemused smile, keeping up a rich commentary on the antics of all the rich and famous people whp passed through their lives.
There will be a post-show discussion with writer and actor Paula Greevy-Lee and director Gerard Lee.
Tickets €16/€18 from www.tht.ie
