[In the following essay, MacNicholas outlines the stage production history of Exiles.]

It is generally agreed, perhaps especially among Joyceans, that Exiles is a bad play, opaque to both reader and viewer. Various explanations have been proffered to account for this failure: Joyce was a narrative prose stylist whose talents were not suited to write realistic drama; Joyce did not sufficiently wean his play from Ibsen; Joyce could not prevent that crucial distance separating art and autobiography from collapsing; the relentlessly dianoetic method of Exiles annihilated its dramatic possibilities; or finally, Joyce wrote the play as something of an exercise to clear the slate as he finished A Portrait of the Artist and began Ulysses. Scholarship has conferred upon Exiles a disapprobation which ranges from confident censure to parenthetical neglect. I wish to consider whether the record of Exiles upon the stage confirms this reputation.¹

This essay is divided into two sections; the first surveys reviews of Exiles' major productions during the last sixty years. The second section explores certain questions of interest to scholars of modern drama and to Joyceans: can a competent production of Exiles hold the stage before a general, non-academic audience? Does it demand any particular technique of staging? Does it survive, or deserve to survive, only through a parasitic attachment to the reputation of its author?

I.

In the fall of 1915, Ezra Pound read the typescript of Exiles Joyce had sent to his agent, J.B. Pinker. Although Pound's private response to Exiles was reserved, he immediately wrote a long and appreciative article on the play for the Chicago journal Drama (it appeared in the February 1916 issue), but Drama declined to publish Exiles. During the next eighteen months Pound, with his typically selfless and eclectic industry, brought Exiles to the attention of various producers: Cecil Dorrian, manager of an American theater (JJ 414); the Incorporated Stage Society; Granville Barker; Edward Knoblock (author of Kismet); and of course Yeats—all to no avail (cf Letters I 91-92, 108; and II 385, 388, 405).² It was also rejected by the Pioneer Players, by Jack Thomas Grein, and by Miss Annie Horniman's redoubtable Manchester Repertory Theatre (Letters II 392, 405). Joyce himself vainly submitted it to theaters in Turin and Bern. The manager of a theater in Zurich told him it was zu gewagt for his stage (Letters I 105).

The best hope for a good production in England lay with London's Stage Society, and so Joyce instructed Pinker on 5 February 1916 to submit Exiles to its secretary, Allan Wade (Letters II 374). Although the Stage Society's reading committee rejected it by a vote of four to two, it attracted the attentions of Sturge Moore and Bernard Shaw. Moore championed the play, and in fact managed to have it reconsidered by the reading committee, which reversed itself in favor of production by a vote of five to four. Debate within the committee over the merits of Exiles was obviously sharp and acrimonious.³ In spite of the reading committee's second voting, the Stage Society declined to produce Exiles for its 1917-1918 season.

Therefore publication preceded production. Grant Richards and B.W. Huebsch simultaneously published Exiles on 25 May 1918. Stefan Zweig, a Viennese novelist, playwright and critic, received a copy and promptly wrote Joyce a warm letter of praise (Letters II 420-21). Zweig may have been instrumental in having Exiles translated into German and then produced in Munich (JJ 457-58). Although Hermine Körner, a leading actress formerly associated with Max Reinhardt's company, played the role of Bertha, other conditions for the première on 7 August 1919 were less than favorable. Joyce, unable to obtain a visa, remained in Zurich and anxiously waited for a verdict by telegram which, when it came, brought bad news. On 26 August 1919 Joyce wrote Harriet Weaver that several German newspapers “had articles about the performance—one contradicting the other. Now I hear it was withdrawn because the chief actor fell ill—perhaps as a result of my lines—and that it is to go into the autumn bill” (Letters II 450).⁴ The reviews were not favorable. The Münchner Neueste Nachrichten concluded with a question: So viel Lärm um ein Irische Stew? (“Much Ado about Nothing better than an Irish Stew?”). The München-Augsburger Abendzeitung, although it warned that Exiles was not for the general public, did not flippantly dismiss the play, which contained “dialectical subtleties and original psychological observation” (JJ 476).

Its première in English occurred in the United States. In 1924 the Neighborhood Playhouse of New York contracted to produce Exiles (Letters III 100), and beginning on 19 February 1925 it ran for 41 performances. The five reviews of this production are evenly divided: two favorable, two adverse, and one ambiguous. Robert Benchley began his notice by attacking Ulysses' “incoherent style.” What one has in Exiles, however, is “ordinary writing. Very very ordinary writing,” which comes “pretty close to zero in stimulating drama.”⁵ George Jean Nathan's review in the American Mercury at least hinted at the content of Exiles. He deplored the “lack of every vestige of action” which resulted from Joyce's incapacity to distinguish between dramatic and non-dramatic words. Nathan observed that the words in Exiles were “supine and sleepy,” and consequently “his play becomes a mere dialectic operetta: three hours of talk in a single monotonous key” conducted in “the spirit and tempo of a German funeral.” The play suffered from “a lack of a clear analysis,” because the “typical Irish vagueness hovers over [it] like a chill mist.”⁶

Stark Young, reviewing for the New York Times, called Exiles a disappointment from the artist whose novels had made the public expect a radical technical originality. On one hand he put the play “safely within the school of Ibsen,” yet on the other decided it was “a doubtful experiment.” But he also responded positively to the “unexpected or at least unusual transcriptions of intense emotional analyses that are presented … especially in the second act and in that extraordinary final speech of the wife to the husband as the curtain falls.”⁷ In Joseph Wood Krutch's opinion, Exiles was given an “excellent interpretation.” Although “it will prove an absorbing play in its own right … it is as a study in the mental history of both the author and his age that it will be found most significant.” Krutch traced Exiles to both Ibsen and Nietzsche and found the ending a picture of “complete despair” shrouding people who “seem to have so much intelligence and so little wisdom.”⁸

Robert Littell, writing for the New Republic, felt that the acting contributed at times a “ludicrous sagginess” to the “brain-spun heaviness” of the play; however, the production had sufficient force for him to make the following judgment:

A tragedy of introspection, with all hands successively or in chorus turning out their spiritual, moral insides, with flashes of terrifying profundity lost in a kind of psychological chess game, all intricate moves and counter-moves, never twice repeated, yet somehow always the same. If only those blinding flashes, those hidden apparitions of souls naked and in pain, could have been merely flashes, apparitions, brief partings of the curtain against a background of more humdrum humanity, of more casual superficial life. But the naked and always more naked souls writhed and suffered ceaselessly, in increasingly complex patterns of self-vivisection.⁹

Sometime in July or early August of 1925, Joyce was informed by W.S. Kennedy, Chairman of the London Stage Society, that Exiles had been accepted for the next season. On 14 and 15 February 1926 the Stage Society's production, directed by W.G. Fay, was given at the Regent Theatre.¹⁰ Ellmann states that “the audience was laudatory, especially for the first two acts, the third puzzling them perhaps by its ambiguous ending” (JJ 587). In the audience was Bernard Shaw, who at a public debate on Exiles sponsored by the Stage Society, “spoke favorably of Joyce's play, which reviewers had disparaged” (JJ 587-88).¹¹

Reviews of this production were indeed unfavorable. Although the critic from the Observer disliked Exiles, he noted “the author's sincerity, and the force with which its theme had assailed him,” but the play “left me with the impression that I had strayed into the consulting room of a psycho-pathologist.”¹² The reviewer from the Leeds Mercury could not be consoled, even by “periodic surveys of the intellectual celebrities in the audience. … I felt a low craving for a rousing melodrama as an antidote.”¹³ The Bristol and Times commended Miss Black-Roberts, who played the role of Bertha, but said that Exiles was “rather tedious and lacking in action.”¹⁴ The Daily Sketch lamented that the characters were even “more melancholy than Tchekhov's without possessing any of their interest or personality.”¹⁵ Ivor Brown from the Saturday Review found nothing worthwhile in the Stage Society's production: “there was occasional wit and one good situation which the author proceeded to muddle away by lacking sense of the theatre.”¹⁶ The reviewer for the Times, however, allowed that he was entertained. After Richard does not forbid Bertha to go to Robert's cottage at the end of Act One, the reviewer discovered that “you begin to wish that somebody would kick Richard, who is possibly a psychorealist but certainly a cad.”¹⁷ The Morning Post declared that “there are passages of beauty in Exiles … which compensate in part for the play's lack of animation.” The critic decided that Bertha had “Italian blood”; that confession was “the inevitable resort of the troubled Irishman”; and that the characters “love only to disturb.”¹⁸ The Yorkshire Post, lamenting that “Mr. James Joyce is entirely destitute of a saving sense of humour,” opined that the play might have succeeded had it been “the familiar but amusing comedy situation of the unmasking of the faithless friend by a conspiracy between husband and wife.” Instead, Exiles indulges in “pretentious intellectual twaddle about the sex relation.”¹⁹ The brief notice in the Liverpool Post concluded: “The play never moves. It is simply a series of dreary dialogues, a ‘striving and striving and ending in nothing.’”²⁰ The Daily Telegraph's reviewer, though he recognized the theme as the “tyranny of freedom,” objected to the ambiguity of the play: “another visit to the play, were that possible (or bearable), might make things clearer.”²¹ Edith Shakleton thought that the characters were detached from the stream of life: “It is impossible to be sorry for them, or to find out what they really meant by the ‘freedom’ which they repeatedly offered to one another.”²²Vogue's critic “was rather shocked by it. Everybody is in love with everybody else's wife, and they talk endlessly about their difficult situation.”²³ And finally, Stage decreed that the Stage Society's production was “more ambitious than successful.”²⁴ No other significant production of Exiles occurred in English in Joyce's lifetime.

In the third week of May 1950, Esmé Percy staged Exiles at the Q Theatre in London. Although this production did not receive wide notice, it was sympathetically reviewed. Harold Hobson wrote that it was “a civilized study of genius trying to free itself of jealousy.” Its theme “is stated with a smooth intelligence that only just falls short of dramatic effectiveness.”²⁵ The Manchester Guardian connected Exiles to the Joyce of Dubliners: “in spite of much knowledge of the human heart and a sympathetic view of the problem posed, almost every Ibsenite stroke misfires.”²⁶ The Times' critic praised the first act—“unmarred by the common little tricks”—and defined Joyce's theme as free love submitting to the test of free infidelity. Though Joyce “underrated the need of the theatre for obvious action, for well-defined, swift and plausible changes in the relations of the characters, his very ignorance of the easier tricks led him to imagine and invent a technique of his own, and he employs a form of speech that is exact yet sounds colloquial.”²⁷

T.C. Worsley's long and probing review of the Percy production is something of a watershed in Exiles' stage history. No previous dramatic criticism had scrutinized the play so steadily on its own terms. Worsley objected to the deferred exposition of Rowan's character. From the beginning the audience should know that Rowan's reputation warrants a leading article in Robert Hand's newspaper, and that all other people around Rowan consider his a “strong” personality. Certain “perplexities of the motivation in the play come from our having to add bits to our understanding of the character in the wrong order” (emphasis Worsley's). He praised the quality of dialogue: “the whole weight of the action and situation will settle on some phrase—quite a simple one it may be—and swell it out with the significance of all that has gone before.” The penalty of such construction, however, is that the texture of the play may become too dense: “But what a pleasurable change to have too much to pick up instead of too little and to feel from the start that every expression, every phrase, has been economically picked, not only for its immediate impact but for its long-term effect.”²⁸

The Renata, an off-Broadway theater in New York, staged Exiles on 12 March 1957. Directed by Walt Witcover, it featured Mark Lenard and Jutta Wolf in the principal roles. Brooks Atkinson's two reviews indicate that he liked the play in spite of its flaws. “Exiles is awkward, wordy, colorless, inconclusive and also consistently engrossing. … It is an attempt at spiritual expression by a man who has lost faith in ‘luminous certitudes’ and is doing penance every day of his life.” Atkinson found the play's relation to Joyce's life intriguing, even admirable. Joyce's exile was simultaneously “intangible and undramatic” and “brave and challenging.”²⁹ He wrote a longer review which appeared ten days later: “On the printed page [Exiles] looks pale and phlegmatic. But on the stage … it has a somber eloquence all its own because it is intensely personal.” Its characters “are less concerned with events than with impulses that lie beneath the surface.” Though often mechanical and “close to naiveté” in construction, the play “is saved by the obvious sincerity of a writer with a forceful mind struggling to express his convictions.”³⁰

Zack Matalon's 1967 London production received no attention in the press, other than Irving Wardle's notice in the Times: “In itself, apart from the close wary duels between the two men, [Exiles] is an inert and hardly speakable exercise that conveys neither [Joyce's] comic range nor his exploration of the unspoken”—primarily because the Ibsen format of the play had put a “straitjacket” on Joyce's talent.³¹

Harold Pinter's first production in 1970 at the Mermaid Theatre cast John Wood, Vivien Merchant, Timothy West and Lynn Farleigh in the roles of Richard, Bertha, Robert and Beatrice. This production was all but universally praised. Most reviewers asseverated the stage success of the play, and those who noticed a resemblance to Ibsen considered this an irrelevant issue. In this respect especially, Wardle's review above of the 1967 production contrasts sharply with his remarks on the Pinter production:

Exiles is customarily dismissed as an unsatisfactory exercise in the Ibsen manner. That view is demolished by the Mermaid production which banishes the shade of Ibsen and reveals an extraordinary affinity between Joyce and Pinter. … An Ibsenite play could well be fashioned from this material, showing the jaws of the past engaging on the present. But that is not Joyce's way: there remain large areas of mystery, and a complete indifference to finding neat solutions. … The characters have practically no room for manoeuvre; they weigh every word they speak, and make not one superfluous gesture. Very little happens, but the effect is one of intense passion, fear, and danger.³²

Martin Esslin also contrasted Exiles and Ibsen's work: “[Doubt]—and here we leave the territory of Ibsen and enter true Joyce country—is what Richard Rowan wanted in the first place, for without this doubt his relationship to his wife would have become no more than a stale habit, with this doubt there will be the constant tension, the constant need to win her and keep her which is the essence of a living relationship.”³³ Esslin and Wardle both noted that Exiles had a greater affinity with Pinter's The Lover (“pre-echoes”) than with anything Ibsen had written.

D.A.N. Jones refuted Pound's charge of obscurity in Exiles. Pound had not responded to “a musicianly quality” which promotes lucidity in “ethical content and logical progress.” “On stage [Exiles] is not obscure, nor need it be in the reading. … Close attention is demanded, but no great skill in puzzling out obscurities.”³⁴ Jeremy Kingston, reviewing for Punch, found that Richard Rowan “is subtle beyond the daydreams of a Jesuit. He wants other people to do what they want but cannot distinguish what they want from what he wants them to want.” Though the play is slightly reminiscent of Ibsen, “the moral dilemmas are Joyce's own.” Because Pinter's direction had emphasized restraint, “the relentless cold passion of the play has a ferocity rare on the stage, totally riveting from curtain-up to curtain fall.”³⁵ Many reviewers, such as the Observer's Ronald Bryden, noted an acidulous mystery in Richard Rowan: “You never for a moment doubt that the intelligence behind his long beaked face is as unique and strange as Joyce's. It's a notable evening.”³⁶

Peter Fiddick of the Guardian reacted to a great underplayed tension: “It is a production of daring, offering no fripperies of style to its audience, demanding total concentration, risking all, and successful in this intent from the first silent moments … to the final exhausted stillness of husband and wife with a spiritual void before them.”³⁷ Benedict Nightengale admired Exiles as an example of realism much superior to The Wild Duck, which was then playing at the Criterion: “All three sides of the triangle maintain perfect poise at moments when the temptation to prefer easy histrionics must have been great. … It's a performance at once moving and lacking in self-pity.”³⁸

Although Kenneth Hurren did not approve of Merchant's Bertha (“not enough innocence or vulnerability”), he found that the play “is both absorbing and engaging … [and] lovingly, if somewhat passionlessly, directed by Harold Pinter.”³⁹ J.W. Lambert concluded that the claim of Exiles' unsuitability for the stage was absurd, “in spite of adopting a pace so slow that it would certainly have sunk a play that was inherently weak.” Its strength lay not in incident, but in “the resonances built up [which] are richer by far than any scuttle of action.”⁴⁰ Harold Hobson defined the conflict in religious terms: “This escape [from an ecclesiastically defined morality] into freedom does not seem to work well. Joyce does not denounce it; he regards it in a troubled bewildered wonder; and Harold Pinter's production finds in Joyce's disturbed mind incalculable depths of mystery. … The play is not about Ireland; it is about hell. … In substance the play is a tragic (and successful) version of what Shaw failed to make comic in Getting Married: that when the rules of the Church are broken, what is put in their place is more grievous still.”⁴¹

Variety pronounced the production a “museum piece, but worth reviving.”⁴² Keith Dewhurst's notice discussed the critical problems raised by a general theater audience confronting the play's uncompromising refusal to emphasize incident and give neat solutions. He questioned whether the play's many excellences jeopardized its chances to be accepted by a conventional audience:

Exiles is an awkward play. It was decades before its time and it has few conventional dramatics or tricks of construction. Some passages drag even in a production as good as this one, and yet it is such a noble piece of work, it exhibits such moral courage, such honest observation of life, and beneath its philosophical surface there is such idealism and such an undeniable belief in the simplest and best things of life, like a touch of a child's hand at the exchange of his confidence—in short, it is such a work of genius, such an aspiration, such a monument to humanity that it is very sad indeed to think that so many people either cannot, or do not want to open their hearts to it.⁴³

Dissenting, J.C. Trewin remarked that he does not consider Joyce to have been a dramatist: “Everyone seemed to be reading between the lines and apparently unearthing a great deal that I could not believe was theatrically valuable. … Joyce ends on a deliberate note of doubt, and presumably we are to come from the theatre in energetic discussion.” He wondered “would this talkative play be analysed closely if it were the work of an untried James Finnegan?”⁴⁴ Herbert Kretzmer, mistakenly attributing Pound's remark on the program notes (“It won't do for the stage”) to Joyce himself, deplored the “morass of words which sucks all in like quicksand, draining the play of life.” In his opinion Exiles would be much improved if more of its characters were like Robert Hand.⁴⁵

The reactions of Swiss journals to Pinter's production contrast sharply with those to the German première in 1919. Alex Natan, reviewing for the St. Galler Tagblatt, called Exiles a masterpiece: “What appears clumsy and too long on paper becomes deliberate, economical, and passionate on stage.”⁴⁶ Julian Exner, however, disliked the abrupt exits throughout the play which were necessary to isolate two characters for intimate conversation.⁴⁷ Gertrude Mander, refuting the opinion that Exiles was merely an epigonic work after Ibsen, described the play as a “piece of outright avant-gardism” which succeeded on stage through the efficacy of “Pinter's characteristic style: exact phrasing, pregnant pause-composition, pointed stylization of characters into the mythic realm, and emphatic multiplicity of gestural meaning.”⁴⁸

On 7 October 1971 The Royal Shakespeare Company presented Pinter's staging of Exiles at the Aldwych. Two of the roles had been recast: T.P. McKenna played Robert, and Estelle Kohler played Beatrice. Most reviewers, whether or not they praised the 1971 production, considered it inferior to its predecessor, a difference usually attributed to the alterations in casting. Moreover, many insisted that Bertha's role should have been recast because Vivien Merchant was unsuited to portray a simple Irish country woman. In spite of such reservations, the positive responses to the 1971 production out-numbered the negative by approximately four to one.

Praising the play as “undeniably interesting,” Benedict Nightengale argued that Exiles illustrated Joyce's belief that people “need their frontiers and maps; they cannot bear too much uncharted freedom.”⁴⁹ John Spurling, paraphrasing Joyce, believed that Exiles, like Ibsen's plays, presented “the outcome of a serious question in the artist's mind; so that there would be no justification in treating these two-dimensional characters as caricatures, they are, rather, moral and emotional standpoints. Pinter's production scrupulously observes this distinction.” Spurling argued that Richard's idealism is fleshless and prompted by too much self-awareness: “In his notes, Joyce compares [Richard] to Siegfried. He is a Siegfried so conscious of being Siegfried that his services to humanity or even to Brünhilde are bound to seem incidental. We have only to compare this self-flattering genius of Joyce's with Ibsen's Lövborg in Hedda Gabler to see what an exciting play Exiles might have been if Joyce had managed to distance himself from his hero.”⁵⁰

Nicholas de Jongh's notice in the Spectator stands apart from virtually every other review by acclaiming Exiles itself yet sternly denouncing Pinter's “grossly overpraised production,” which created a “wilfully unsuitable” atmosphere characterized by a “numbing silence, a blank void to intermit the dialogue.” He asserted that Exiles develops with greater effectiveness the problem Ibsen had treated in When We Dead Awaken: “[Exiles] is an early example of interior drama which treats profound and personal emotion realistically: no towers or vineleaves, no crutches or mountain tops. … The play not only shows that densely written cerebral drama can achieve a thrilling impetus, it marks Joyce as a courageous autobiographer and a key figure in early drama of this century.”⁵¹

J.W. Lambert noted that Exiles “was an enthralling picture of intellectual ambition, spiritual guilt, the pressures of provincial puritanism.”⁵² Derek Mahon found in Exiles' “catechetical procedures and strategies of evasion” a “curiously Pinteresque quality.” Joyce's play is an exercise in “stylistic fire”; its verbal nature—which connects the play to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake—is manifested under Pinter's hand.⁵³ Thus Mahon's judgment opposes the conclusion drawn by most literary critics: that Exiles' verbal drabness presents a stark contrast to Joyce's fictional style. Punch's brief review does not differ significantly in tone from the above two. Harold Hobson altered but slightly the interpretation he had expressed the previous year. Exiles shows why the Church may not be abandoned with impunity: “Joyce seems to say that when the moral rules go their place is taken by treachery, and his evident reluctance to say so is the source of the play's haunting power.”⁵⁴

David Mairowitz's essay in the Village Voice described Exiles as “a stunning experience” which “shows us just what a devastating masterpiece has been buried under the deadweight of traditional response for fifty years.” He argued that it transcends its well-made play form. In the first act “a modern audience (myself included) is so jaded in its responses that instantly one is forced into the usual ruts. Where is this play going? The characters are simply talking, talking, talking.” Yet by the second act, one finds “a wealth of dialogue whose internal power is nothing less than atomic. … And the play itself is cold and brutal, attempting to carve through the morality of the family unit, of sexual bonds, of friendship. Not a ghost of sentiment anywhere.” According to Mairowitz, the static quality of Exiles becomes an asset: “the production is slow and deliberate, uncut, acted for every moment, every twist, without an idea ‘thrown away’ in the cause of ‘pace’. … The fact that it works and is riveting to the point of pain is no theatrical miracle, it is mere common sense. …”⁵⁵ The less exuberant tone of Michael Billington's review represents a similar appraisal. Pinter's direction brought out in the dialogue its “iron formality: and the over-riding virtue of Harold Pinter's production is that it matches this [formality] with a propriety of its own in which the slightest emotional outburst acquires volcanic force.”⁵⁶ Irving Wardle concluded that the altered cast succeeded “no less than the original in reclaiming James Joyce's long undervalued play.” Exiles could appear as a “piece of literary vanity, both in its buttoned-up style and in the unchallenged dominance of the writer hero.” Pinter, however, “turns such liabilities into the play's main strengths.”⁵⁷

Katharine J. Worth's thoughtful analysis of Pinter's 1971 production argues that “Exiles has a more important place in the tradition [of realism] than has commonly been agreed.” But it was Pinter's form of realism—so the reviewers had said—so much so that “it was common to hear people wondering whether Pinter really had written it, in the sense, they would explain, of cutting or rearranging or, above all, of introducing un-Joycean silences so as to maneuver it into a more Pinteresque position. If one did have any doubts of this kind, a very quick re-reading of the text would be enough to dispel them and show that Pinter had followed his directions with exactly the same kind of scrupulous accuracy that Joyce put into devising them.”⁵⁸ A chief virtue of her essay is that she attempts to explain why reading Exiles is so unmoving while seeing it on stage is exciting: “One notices the importance of pauses and silences in the text after having seen the production, but it would be easy to overlook them without that help. Joyce doesn't draw attention to them by the typographical layout as Pinter does. …”⁵⁹ At the end of the second act, for example, when Robert urges Bertha to declare love for him, the stage direction reads, “She does not answer. In the silence the rain is heard falling.” Worth's reaction to this moment in the theatre is as follows:

The words are banal but on stage the situation wasn't. After two acts of tightly held tension and probing … this non-verbal moment came as an exquisite relief, almost in itself the consummation that Bertha and Robert were looking for. The direction “In the silence the rain is heard falling” suggests that Joyce was aiming at just that impression of lyrical sadness that Pinter brought out so delicately.

And yet it was also a moment of deep frustration. “She does not answer.” In this simple sentence, which needs a stage to realize its force, Joyce seems to be anticipating almost the whole of Pinter. A drama of silence and “not knowing” is contained in Exiles, though it's enclosed in the framework of a wordier and more knowing kind of realism.⁶⁰

Exiles' innovation, then, consists of “a technique which no one had used in quite that way before in the English theatre for keeping the banal material taut and turning it towards a searching reading of character; a version of Ibsen's ‘investigation’ technique with silence, pauses, visual movement used in something more like the Chekhovian way.”⁶¹

Arthur Sainer's response to the 1971 Intense Family Company's production in New York, directed by John Stillings, took issue with Mairowitz's review of the second Pinter production. Sainer felt that the play did not work because of a disjunction of people and the author's ideas, a split arising not from sparseness in characterization or weak definition of conflict, but from a lapse of “theatrical imagination”: Joyce “puts the cart before the horse, the ideas happen first and then his people scurry to where the ideas are happening.” In spite of this weakness, “Joyce has nevertheless created a compelling work, call it what you will.” In opposition to most literary critics, Sainer decided that Joyce's identification with Richard was a vital asset: “Joyce's wound dominates the play, and to the extent that Joyce and Richard Rowan are one, the play is wondrous in its passion.”⁶²

In 1973 Exiles was finally produced in Dublin, opening at the Peacock on 21 February. Desmond Rushe called the production “a course of caviar, top quality,” praising the acting and directing of a play which is “brittle, difficult and intellectually absorbing.” Interestingly, Rushe employed a metaphor emphasizing lightness rather than heaviness: Exiles utilized a “pattern of gossamer delicacy [which represented] the austerely aesthetic creative writer sitting in philosophical analysis at [Exiles'] centre.”⁶³ David Nowlan suggested that perhaps Joyce and not Pinter might deserve some credit for the success of Pinter's productions: if Exiles has found its own time in theater, “it is because its hour has been prepared by Beckett (ironically) and by Pinter's own writings.” Echoing Worth's analysis presented above, Nowlan suggested that Exiles “may prove to be a bridge between Ibsen's theatre” and that of Beckett and Pinter. Although its structure is contrived and awkward, Exiles presents “a most substantial study of a man exiled by his intellect, his imagination and his arrogance from the ordinary affection on which human beings subsist.”⁶⁴ Mary Manning, reviewing for Hibernia, disliked nearly everything about the “almost totally humourless” play, “which is based on a discreditable episode in the author's own life,” as well as the production, which, though “technically well staged,” was “played in reverential whispers at a snail's pace.”⁶⁵

Four years later Exiles was again produced in Dublin by the Stage One Theatre at Trinity College, which was hosting the Joyce Symposium at the time. Critical reception was quite mixed. Rushe felt that the production lacked “vocal colour and variety of pacing and a degree of subtlety in interpretation.”⁶⁶ Con Houlihan declared that interest in Exiles was “inevitably extrinsic,” although the production was “sensitive and compelling,” and hovered “on the brink of drama.”⁶⁷ John Finegan decided that Exiles oscillated “dangerously between melodrama and pathos, despite its serious intent to probe the mind of a writer; the hard core is not easy to discover.”⁶⁸ Teresa Brogan's notice, however, stated that the production “grafted on the flesh of human kind.”⁶⁹ Kane Archer's review in the Irish Times praised the production generally, citing the danger of producing Exiles lay in avoiding some awkwardness and unintentional comedy. Certain lines are “of great emotional intensity, where it is imperative that one play against the script, creating a kind of theatrical palimpsest where the character becomes for a moment an actor in his own drama, playing behind a mask.”⁷⁰

Also in 1977, Exiles was staged by the Circle Repertory Theatre in New York and directed by Rob Thirkield. Reviews, though mixed, were on the whole favorable. Harold Clurman noted, rather paradoxically, that the play “seems forthright realism,” yet it also seems not to take place “in the ‘world,’ or even on the stage but within Joyce's turbid subconscious.” Over its proceedings is “a veil … that no amount of straightforward acting can penetrate.” Consequently, “for all Rowan-Joyce's lucidity of expression, it never brings about anything more concrete than a yowl of distress.”⁷¹ Sainer's notice in the Village Voice, concurring in tone with Clurman, stated that Exiles “still presents the spectator with the problem of making the leap from computing symbolic equations to allowing flesh-and-blood experience to find a home within him.”⁷² Disagreeing with these opinions are Mel Gussow and Edith Oliver, Gussow declaring that Rowan was “a man of fascinating contradictions.” The play, which contains a “beguiling air of mystery and domestic menace,” is “tantalizing, unjustly neglected.”⁷³ Oliver felt that the production was “believable and engrossing”: altogether “a wonder: profound in its emotional probing, utterly convincing in its portrayal of Bertha and Richard—their storms and lulls and the grief they share over what has been lost between them—and often funny. …” The only weakness she detected in the structure of the play was the characterization of Beatrice.⁷⁴ The Newark Star-Ledger's notice praised Thirkield's production, which “instilled such a haunting quality to the play that sometimes it even seems better than it actually is.”⁷⁵ Myron Schwartzman felt that the production—a “very pleasant surprise”—was not only faithful to the script, “but witty, imaginative, and amusing in the bargain.”⁷⁶

Although Exiles has hardly had extensive exposure on stage, reviews of these ten different productions since its première prompt several observations. Apparently, only Harold Pinter has staged Exiles with unqualified success. It therefore seems fair to say that the play itself is unusually dependent upon acting and directing skills to be effective. However, judging from the numerous reviews given to Pinter's two productions, it also seems fair to say that Exiles can provide an exciting and even somewhat terrifying theatrical experience. Reviews of the other productions are not nearly so adverse as one, having read much literary criticism devoted to the play, might have supposed. In lesser hands the problem of “pace” becomes apparent. In a way Joyce himself created this problem by taking an old comic form—the exposure of a faithless friend—and working it to a new end. Because the play does not sanction completely the behavior of any principal, Joyce's contemporary audience, expecting fast development and crisp reversals, became confused, frustrated, angry, or bored. After Joyce became a celebrity, it was only inevitable that interest in Exiles would become “extrinsic.” It is, after all, a highly autobiographical play, and its author had a strange and perplexing personality. But these facts say little about the quality of the play itself; they advert primarily to an audience's interest in it. Such interest, while not necessarily spurious, can interfere with our vision of the play.

The most crucial thing these reviews have revealed is that Joyce was struggling toward a new kind of theater. Ambiguity and stylized silences are at the center of this theatrical technique. Joyce's insistence upon ambiguity has become commonplace among readers of his fiction, yet one often hears Exiles described as a play fatally wounded by its multiple ambiguities and by its static procedures. Certainly Joyce was not the discoverer of artistic employment of ambiguity, but what play before Exiles kept the audience on the tenterhooks of a central ambiguity for three long acts and then refused to let them off at the end? What previous play about a cuckold did not represent him as foolish, deceived, or stupid?

The ambiguities of Exiles are indeed wrapped in a method of pronounced pauses and silence. Joyce was attempting to depict the danger, the suffering and suspicion of all the principals in these silences, which are written into the stage instructions. It is interesting to note that Joyce, so skilled with words, was relying so completely upon the skill of actors to convey his meanings. The third act, particularly, is studded with long silences, such as Bertha staring into Richard's empty study (E 91.21-28); Bertha silently watching Richard read the paper (E 102.12-17); Robert pausing after Bertha says Richard will believe that Robert fears him if he, Robert, departs without a word “after last night” (E 106.3); or finally, this rather explicit instruction of even the nature of the silence which follows Robert's avowal of friendship to a shaken Richard:

ROBERT:
There is nothing to thank me for, Richard. Now and always I am your friend. Now more than ever before. Do you believe me, Richard?
RICHARD sits down on a chair and buries his face in his hands. BERTHA and ROBERT gaze at each other in silence. Then she turns away and goes out quietly on the right. ROBERT goes towards RICHARD and stands near him, resting his hands on the back of a chair, looking down at him. There is a long silence.

(E 106.29-107.3)

How microscopically Joyce considered this silence is further indicated in his fair copy manuscript, in which the last sentence in the stage instruction quoted above had originally read a long painful silence. Thrust and counterthrust, questions which raise still more questions, confused and confusing loyalties, an atmospheric yet palpable menace, pregnant silences leading toward irresolution—all are the fiber and tissue of much of our drama since 1950, and all are clearly articulated in Exiles. It is an interesting irony that two Irishmen, Joyce and Beckett, should have been the first to exploit silence in an art defined by human speech.

Because of the high degree of skill it demands, Exiles will probably be staged but infrequently. Yet the number and enthusiasm of positive responses to stage productions of Exiles call the received literary judgment of the play's merits into question. Perhaps literary critics have had difficulty liking the play because Richard Rowan himself is so unlikeable. Yet it does not matter whether an audience likes Richard; more important is whether the role itself, competently performed, holds the stage. John Wood has obviously made the character live. His portrayal of Richard earned him the London Theatre Critics' Award for the 1970 season's most promising actor. This suggests not only that Wood is an excellent actor, but also that the role itself offers drama.

Joyce had to wait for twelve years after the publication of Ulysses before it could be legally sold and its copyright protected in the United States. Exiles has, in a sense, waited much longer. This play, like Joyce's fiction, is austere and somewhat forbidding. But literary criticism alone cannot prove whether a play intended for the stage is a good play. Even Ezra Pound, who never liked Exiles although he understood its seriousness, conceded that good actors might make it absorbing on stage. These reviews ratify Pound's second thoughts about the play. They are valuable because they expose the dubiety of the assumptions that Exiles is impossible to stage successfully, and that Joyce did not possess a playwright's talents—assumptions Pound himself did much to foster. Moreover, these reviews might also return us to the gritty text of the play itself.

Notes

1. For a brief survey of scholarly opinion on Exiles see John MacNicholas, “Joyce's Exiles: The Argument for Doubt,” JJQ, 11 (Fall 1973), 39, n1. Because I am here concerned solely with the stage performances of the play, reviews of its publication in 1918 will not be discussed. For further study of these see Robert H. Deming, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 1 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 130-61.

2. These were not unlikely markets. Grein, an influential producer and critic, founded the Independent Theatre in 1891, which introduced London to Ibsen (Ghosts) and Shaw (Widowers' Houses). Miss Horniman was most instrumental in the Irish Theatre Movement. In 1903 she built and equipped the Abbey Theatre, and from 1908 to 1917 she supported the excellent repertory company at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. See Letters II 401-02.

3. For a detailed account of this and related issues see John MacNicholas, “James Joyce's Exiles and the Incorporated Stage Society,” ICarbS, 4 (Spring-Summer 1978), 10-16.

4. Joyce kept his wry humor about this painful première. Six years later he gave Sylvia Beach this terse summary: “Producer: Elizabeth Koerner. Complete fiasco. Row in theatre. Play withdrawn. Author invited but not present. German Foreign Office did not allow his entrance. Thank God” (Letters III 126).

5. Life, 85 (12 March 1925), 20.

6. American Mercury, 4 (April 1925), 501-02.

7. Times (New York), 20 February 1925, p. 20.

8. Nation, 120 (11 March 1925), 272.

9. New Republic, 17 (4 March 1925), 45.

10. Fay, an experienced Irish actor and director who was vital to the early history of the Abbey, was an excellent choice. He and his brother Frank appeared in numerous Abbey productions, including the famous riot-provoking première of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. For further study see Fay's reminiscences, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre and Merely Players.

11. Ellmann does not specify his source for Shaw's remarks. Mr. Mathew Norgate, then Secretary for the Stage Society, has told me that Shaw was not present at the debate, of which there is not, to my knowledge, a published record or transcript.

12. Observer, 21 February 1926.

13. Leeds Mercury, 16 February 1926.

14. Bristol and Times, 16 February 1926.

15. Daily Sketch, 16 February 1926.

16. Saturday Review, 141 (20 February 1926), 224.

17. Times (London), 16 February 1926, p. 12.

18. Morning Post, 16 February 1926.

19. Yorkshire Post, 16 February 1926.

20. Liverpool Post, 16 February 1926.

21. Daily Telegraph, 16 February 1926.

22. Queen, 24 February 1926, p. 14.

23. Vogue, March 1926.

24. Stage, 23 December 1926.

25. Times (London), 21 May 1950, p. 4.

26. Manchester Guardian, 18 May 1950, p. 6.

27. Times (London), 17 May 1950, p. 3.

28. New Statesman and Nation, 39 (27 May 1950), 602-03.

29. Times (New York), 14 March 1957, p. 34.

30. Ibid., 24 March 1957.

31. Times (London), 22 April 1967, p. 7.

32. Ibid., 13 November 1970, p. 13.

33. Plays and Players, 18 (January 1971), 38.

34. Listener, 84 (26 November 1970), 760.

35. Punch, 25 November 1970, pp. 768-69.

36. Observer Review, 15 November 1970, p. 29.

37. Guardian, 13 November 1970, p. 8.

38. New Statesman, 80 (20 November 1970), 689.

39. Spectator, 225 (21 November 1970), 652.

40. Drama, 100 (Spring 1971), 21.

41. Times (London), 15 November 1970, p. 29.

42. Variety, 25 November 1970, p. 50.

43. Guardian, 19 November 1970, p. 10.

44. Illustrated London News, 257 (28 November 1970), 31.

45. Daily Express, 13 November 1970, p. 18.

46. St. Galler Tagblatt, 4 December 1970.

47. Luzerner Neueste Nachrichten, 30 November 1970.

48. Theatre Heute, 12 (January 1971), 36.

49. New Statesman, 82 (15 October 1971), 518.

50. Plays and Players, 19 (December 1971), 44.

51. Spectator, 227 (16 October 1971), 557.

52. Drama, 103 (Winter 1971), 22.

53. Listener, 86 (14 October 1971), 522.

54. Times (London), 10 October 1971, p. 37.

55. Village Voice, 16 (18 November 1971), 74.

56. Guardian, 8 October 1971, p. 10.

57. Times (London), 8 October 1971, p. 20.

58. “Joyce via Pinter,” Revolutions in Modern English Drama (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1973), p. 46.

59. Ibid., p. 47.

60. Ibid., p. 48.

61. Ibid., p. 53.

62. Village Voice, 2 December 1971, p. 65.

63. Irish Independent, 22 February 1973, p. 13.

64. Irish Times, 22 February 1973, p. 12.

65. Hibernia, 2 March 1973, p. 28.

66. Irish Independent, 15 June 1977, p. 24.

67. Irish Press, 15 June 1977.

68. Evening Herald, 15 June 1977, p. 2.

69. Evening Press, 15 June 1977.

70. Irish Times, 15 June 1977, p. 11.

71. Nation, 11 June 1977, pp. 732-33.

72. Village Voice, 13 June 1977, p. 13.

73. Times (New York), 20 May 1977, p. C3.

74. New Yorker, 30 May 1977, pp. 84-86.

75. William A. Raidy, Newark Star-Ledger, 24 May 1977.

76. JJQ, 14 (Spring 1977), 361-62.