A return to Exiles

When a play is rarely performed, it's easy to assume that there must be a good reason why. In the case of the great modernist writer James Joyce's only extant play, Exiles, completed in 1915 and given only one significant production in this country in 1970 by Harold Pinter, it's generally agreed that the play has been neglected because it's simply not very good.

Only last week the author Philip Hensher wrote an article in the Guardian to this effect, arguing that, as a rule, novelists should stick to writing novels, not plays.

Even Samuel Beckett - a playwright clearly in debt to the structural experiments of Ulysses - declared to Pinter that he was 'a brave man to take it on'. So is Exiles a bad play? And if so, why is James Macdonald reviving this theatrical curio at the National?

'I find it difficult to answer this,' he says slowly, on a stifling hot day at the theatre, with several preview performances of Exiles already under his belt.

'I just don't see it. Joyce was 40 years ahead of his time when he wrote the play. Given its taboo-busting subject, I can understand why audiences at the time didn't go for it. And these days critics don't tend to like it because the language lacks a certain richness. But formally, it's very innovative; it's way out there. And the subject matter feels very contemporary.'

That subject matter, even to this day, remains provocative. Partly inspired by Joyce's marriage, the play explores whether sexual, emotional and intellectual freedom within marriage is truly possible through the relationships between two couples.

Joyce was obsessed with the idea of his wife, Nora, having affairs. Macdonald recounts with glee Joyce once saying to Nora: 'I wish you would sleep with other men. It would give me something to write about.'

In Exiles, the character most similar to Joyce, Richard, encourages his wife of nine years, Bertha, to indulge her desire for Robert, himself married to Richard's cousin Beatrice.

'Richard encourages Bertha to take her freedom and live the imaginative outcome of that,' says Macdonald. 'In the end the project is a failure to some extent: it's an open question of whether she actually has or not.

'Yet these ideas seem interesting to me today in a culture where less than half of us get married. Obviously the conversation these people were having was revolutionary and unperformable in 1915. But I do think the play came into its own in the 1960s and 1970s, given what people were going through. It's interesting to look at it in that respect, to see where we have got to.'