Joyce Audio – Audiobooks: Drama & Poetry
- At October 07, 2022
- By Great Quail
- In Joyce
0
Joyce Audio: Drama & Poetry
This page profiles professional and commercial recordings of Joyce’s drama and poetry. Most links take you Amazon, where you may listen to samples and download digital “aax” files for your Audible-enabled device. Other media such as LP, cassette, CD, MP3, and FLAC are listed separately.
Joyce Audio
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Drama
Exiles
Exiles (Audiobook)
Performed by Lance Rasmussen, Jo Palfi, Elizabeth Klett, Graham Scott, Linda Barrans, Leanne Yau
Spoken Realms, 2021
Unabridged; 2 hours, 37 minutes
James Joyce’s only surviving play, Exiles has drawn a fair share of criticism over the years—I certainly dislike it—but it also has some notable defenders, including Padraic Colum and Harold Pinter. It’s rarely performed, and this “staged” version by the Online Stage Company is the only audiobook recording commercially available. This makes it particularly unfortunate that poor casting choices mar an otherwise noble effort.
The biggest problem lies with its central character, James Joyce’s alter-ego Richard Rowan. While this statement may be said of Exiles itself—Rowan is an insufferable protagonist!—he’s not boring, and Lance Rasmussen delivers a wooden performance that fails to find the arrogant heart of this casually abusive artist. Rasmussen also delivers his lines with a distinctly American accent, occasionally inflected with something that may be an Irish lilt.
The role of Richard’s “frenemy” Robert Hand is played by Graham Scott, who delivers his lines with more feeling than Rasmussen, but seems painfully miscast. True, Scott captures Robert’s “rather slow” manner of speech, but his voice sounds significantly older than a man in his mid-thirties. There’s also a dullness to his tone that belies Robert’s education—after all, while never portrayed as a genius, Robert is a well-connected journalist partly-based on Oliver St. John Gogarty. As played by Scott, he sounds more like a tired salesman. More fatally, Scott fails to capture the spark of passion that animates this “Playboy of the Western World,” a zealous advocate of free love. His Robert is more saturnine than saturnalia, and his phlegmy voice and mannered exhaustion give his musings about sex an unsavory vibe—more creepy fantasies than the libertine reflections of an aging cad.
Meanwhile, the opposite is true of Bertha. Described as “young woman” with a “cordial and self-possessed” manner, Bertha is the most sympathetic character in the play, and her part is written with an awareness of her stoicism and resilience—after all, this is a woman who followed Richard into exile, has been raising his illegitimate son, and has been living a Continental lifestyle for nearly a decade. For whatever reason, Jo Palfi—whose sole acting credit seems limited to this audiobook—portrays Bertha as a precocious teenager, her voice comically girlish. This becomes even more jarring during the flirtatious scenes between Bertha and Robert. In the play, they’re no more than ten years apart; probably less. (If we go by the actual age of Nora Barnacle, Bertha’s real-life inspiration, then Robert is only a few years older.) But deprived of seeing the actors, the mind’s eye calibrates their ages from their voices. In this audio production, Robert sounds like a middle-aged man seducing his friend’s daughter, rather than a Lothario seducing his wife. The effect is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds. There’s also Palfi’s inexplicable accent to negotiate, which seems to thicken on consonants and leave vowels largely untouched.
The only character who hits the right notes is Beatrice Justice. She’s played by Elizabeth Klett, a literature professor who doubles as an audiobook narrator. Her Beatrice is deftly attuned to the many complexities of the character. A young woman attempting to move from girlish fantasies to adulthood, her Beatrice is alternately coquettish and shy, conniving and confused, and fully aware of her awkward place in Joyce’s bizarre love quadrangle.
Leanne Yau’s stage directions are crisply delivered and integrated seamlessly into the dialogue. She also doubles as Archie, Bertha and Richard’s young son. The final character is Brigit, voiced by actress Linda Barrans doing her best “I’m just a pitiful old Irish servant, have some tea dearie, please don’t burn me as a witch” routine. It’s not that Archie and Brigit are poorly acted, it’s just another reminder you’re listening to an audiobook, rather than watching a staged production with actors of appropriate gender and age for their roles.
Having put this production through the ringer, I still think this Exiles is worth hearing! It’s reasonably priced, has crystal-clear sound quality, and despite its many flaws, the production is genuinely heartfelt—it’s not like anyone’s staging Exiles for popular acclaim! While the production fails to redeem Joyce’s turgid drama, it’s the closest most of us will come to seeing Exiles performed live. Hopefully another version will come along with more sensitive characterizations.
Cast:
Richard Rowan—Lance Rasmussen
Berta—Jo Palfi
Beatrice Justice—Elizabeth Klett
Robert Hand—actor Graham Scott
Brigid/Fisherwoman—Linda Barrans
Stage Directions/Archie—Leanne Yau
Publisher’s Description: Exiles is the only play written by James Joyce. It draws material from “The Dead,” the final story in his famous short stories collection, Dubliners. It centers around four individuals—Richard, Robert, Bertha, and Beatrice—and the complex romantic entanglements between them as tensions rise and relationships are tested.
Poetry
James Joyce Soundbook
James Joyce Soundbook
Read by James Joyce, Cyril Cusack, Siobhán McKenna, and E.G. Marshall
Caedmon, 1971 (From materials recorded 1924-1971)
Available as: 4-LP Box Set | Cassettes
James Joyce Audio Collection
James Joyce Audio Collection
Read by James Joyce, Cyril Cusack, Siobhán McKenna, E.G. Marshall, Colm Meaney, and Jim Norton
Caedmon, 2002 (From materials recorded 1924-2000)
Available as: 4-CD Box Set | Brazen Head MP3
The history of these wonderful Caedmon recordings is explained in “Audiobook Collections.” It’s featured on this page because the first CD contains readings of Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, and “Ecce Puer.” All are read by Irish actor Cyril Cusack (1910-1993), a member of the Royal Shakespearean Company and renown for his fluency in Gaelic. Cusack is a brilliant interpreter of Joyce, sensitive to the text’s abundant lyricism and stream-of-consciousness cadence. Although he burdens Chamber Music with a gravitas the poems can scarcely bear, he skillfully navigates their archaic phrasings, elusive tensions, and frequent bouts of melancholy.
The James Joyce Collection
The James Joyce Collection
Read by Gabriel Byrne
New Millennium Audio, 1992
Dove Audio, 1996
Blackstone, 2017
Aldo available as: MP3-CD
Abridged; 5 hours, 15 minutes
This collection of readings is performed by Gabriel Byrne, perhaps the most famous Irish actor of his generation and a lifetime interpreter of Joyce. Byrne played the role of Blazes Boylan in the 1982 TV film, Joyce In June, and has been responsible for various Joyce-related productions at the Irish Repertory Theatre in NYC. (And he played Lord Byron in Ken Russell’s bonkers 1986 film, Gothic!) Byrne takes a light touch with Joyce’s poetry, but invests the Dubliners stories with a restrained tension—hardly a surprise, his reading of “The Dead” is a highlight of the collection. Unfortunately, the set suffers from a lack of organization and poor indexing, with the poems from Chamber Music interspersed between the other readings. The selections curiously omit Poem XXXVI, “I Hear an Army,” often considered the finest piece in Chamber Music.
Contents:
- Excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Chamber Music I, “Strings in the Earth and Air”
- Chamber Music II, “The Twilight Turns”
- Dubliners—“The Sisters”
- Chamber Music III, “At That Hour”
- Dubliners—“An Encounter”
- Chamber Music IV, “When the Shy Star Goes Forth in Heaven”
- Dubliners—“Araby”
- Chamber Music V, “Lean Out of the Window”
- Chamber Music VI, “I Would in That Sweet Bosom Be”
- Chamber Music VII, “My Love Is in a Light Attire”
- Chamber Music VIII, “Who Goes Amid the Greenwood”
- Chamber Music IX, “Winds of May”
- Chamber Music X, “Bright Cap and Streamers”
- Dubliners—“Two Gallants”
- Chamber Music XI, “Bid Adieu”
- Chamber Music XII, “What Counsel Has the Hooded Moon”
- Chamber Music XIV, “My Dove, My Beautiful One”
- Dubliners—“Eveline”
- Chamber Music XV, “From Dewey Dreams”
- Chamber Music XVI, “O Cool Is the Valley Now”
- Dubliners—“Clay”
- Chamber Music XVII, “Because Your Voice Was at My Side”
- Chamber Music XIX, “Be Not Sad”
- Chamber Music XX, “In the Dark Pine-Wood”
- Chamber Music XXI, “He Who Hath Glory Lost”
- Chamber Music XXII, “Of That So Sweet Imprisonment”
- Dubliners—“A Painful Case”
- Chamber Music XXIII, “This Heart That Flutters Near My Heart”
- Chamber Music XXIV, “Silently She’ s Combing”
- Chamber Music XXV, “Lightly Come or Lightly Go”
- Chamber Music XXXII “Rain Has Fallen All the Day”
- Chamber Music XXXIII, “Now, O Now in This Brown Land”
- Chamber Music XXXIV, “Sleep Now, O Sleep Now”
- Chamber Music XXXV, “All Day I Hear the Noise of Water”
- Dubliners—“The Dead”
Publisher’s Description: In short stories, poems, and monumental novels, James Joyce set out to discover the meaning of his nationality, simultaneously celebrating and ridiculing the history of Ireland in the brilliant style that has made him the most towering figure in the literary landscape of the early 20th century. Dublin-born Gabriel Byrne, who has starred in 16 films, including Little Women and The Usual Suspects, clearly brings to life Joyce’s short stories from Dubliners, and selections from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Chamber Music in this audio version.
Joyce Audio
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Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 12 June 2024
Main Joyce Page: The Brazen Head
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