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Happy Bloomsday, Cowes

14/6/2018

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James Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904 in the city of Dublin. Tomorrow night Cowes joins the international Bloomsday party when Maggie Millar reprises her acclaimed reading of Molly Bloom.

JAMES Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904 in the city of Dublin. For many years, fans of Joyce around the world have celebrated the novel with readings on this day, which has come to be called “Bloomsday”.
 
This year Cowes joins the international Bloomsday celebrations. Award-winning Australian actress Maggie Millar, now a Cowes resident, will read the famous last section, in which Molly Bloom lies musing late at night beside the sleeping form of her husband Leopold.
 
She reflects on life, on her relationship with Leopold, on his possible affairs, on the death of their son, on her earlier life growing up in Gibraltar, and on her intense sexual encounter earlier that day with her own lover, Blazes Boylan. (The graphic description of the latter led to the book being banned for many years.) The final words “and yes I said yes I will / Yes” are among the most famous in all fiction.
 
Producer Ian Robinson – who is also Maggie’s husband – says Joyce’s depiction of Molly Bloom has been acknowledged as the finest evocation of the female psyche ever created by a male.
 
A Ulysses fan, he first heard a reading of Molly Bloom in London in the late 1970s and immediately thought Maggie could have made a much better job of it.  
 
It wasn’t until 1991 that she tackled it, and then it was in a stage production at La Mama Theatre in Carlton. Since then she has performed it occasionally as a reading at festivals and other venues, including two sold-out performances at 45 Downstairs in Melbourne.
 
Her reading received the ultimate accolade of an invitation to perform Molly Bloom in Dublin on Bloomsday in 2007. The day involved a reading of the whole book by a succession of actors and celebrities.
 
Helen Thomson has written in The Australian that Maggie’s Molly is “a lustful, warm, superstitious, frank, comical, romantic and sexy woman”.
 
Former residents of The Gurdies before moving to Kyneton, Maggie and Ian moved to Cowes early last year.
 
Maggie Millar reads Molly Bloom. Cowes Uniting Church, 86 Chapel Street, Saturday June 16, 8pm. Tickets: $25/$20. Book at https://www.trybooking.com/VEUH or tickets at the door.
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