Forget linking this performance to its rich and foreboding parent, Finnegans Wake: simply providing a summary of Riverrun is a Joycean enough task to keep all but the most cloistered bibliophile awake at night.
This beguiling production is not so much a retelling or recreation of James Joyce’s (in)famous text as much as a fiercely emotive response to a story which has clung to its mantle of Great Novel through sheer bombastic complexity; you don’t really read his final novel, rather you simply still your struggles and let it happen.
This is not to say either novel or play is incomprehensible. Both are remarkably crafted, dense experiences, yet why I feel such magnetism to both literature and theatre is for the engagement I find there, the pleasure of collaboration between creation and witness. Riverrun is immersive, like diving headlong into an unknown body of water – but that sense of participation, of being captured by a production, is largely absent.
In its place is a solo performance unlike any other, and this is no empty cliché. Olwen Fouéré (who I last saw in what stands as one of the greatest productions I have ever seen, 2011’s Terminus) smiles slightly and serenely as the audience files into the theatre before embarking on a 65-minute monologue that weaves in and out of character, time and place, “from swerve of shore to bend of bay”. Even her moments are of the silt-sodden stream, languid, sweeping; Fouéré’s physicality is quite commendable. Her memory must also be tack sharp, yet such is the nature of her dialogue (compiled and composed by Fouéré herself) that it’s possible she may have repeated great swathes of text throughout and the audience would be none the wiser.
Familiarity with Joyce would be useful in understanding this stunning barrage of image and narrative – he remains one of the great stream-of-consciousness writers – but only to a point. Reading these blistering, intoxicating, luscious passages gives us time to savour the sense, or in the very least construct our own. Yet as Fouéré personifies Dublin’s River Liffey (who itself/herself merges with the character Anna Livia Plurabelle), lines are delivered in dialects so unusual they might hail from the moon; so much so, at times any semblance to language becomes as anthropomorphic as the whispered words of water that trickles across river stone and suckers into sand. It is remarkable, but exhausting, and takes a dedicated audience to even attempt plumbing the depths.
3/5 stars
Riverrun played at Wharf 2 Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company until Saturday April 11.
