[In the following review, Clurman asserts that the lack of believability of Exiles supports the notion that Joyce was “no playwright.”]

Extraordinarily intelligent, supremely self-conscious, James Joyce did not wholly understand himself. What eluded him was the fact that he was seeking within himself the essence of godhood that could not be found there. A lapsed Catholic, he believed himself an enemy of the Church, when in truth he never ceased being deeply, ineradicably Irish Catholic. His formidable intellectual equipment served on the personal level to addle his brain and conscience. Fortunately he was a lord of language and a genius.

If I begin my review of Exiles, the play Joyce completed in 1915 shortly after writing A Portrait of the Artist, in this abstruse way, it is because there is something in Exiles and in much of Joyce's work that leads to fuzzy comment.

I have seen the play three times in different productions. (The latest is now at the Circle Repertory Company's theatre.) On each occasion I have had difficulty remembering its by no means tangled plot. It seemed to me that it was not taking place in the “world,” or even on the stage but within Joyce's turbid subconscious. At first, I was under the impression that the ruminative quality I found in Exiles was due to productions which were so subdued or “faraway” that the characters appeared to be speaking from the bottom of a well.

But the Circle Company's production has been directed by Rob Thirkield to be more normally dramatic and much more lively than the two others I have seen. As I left the theatre I felt that at last I grasped the play, which is on its surface not the least bit arcane; but when I came to “explain” it to myself, I found once again that it had all become unreal, as if it had vanished in vapor.

It is an autobiographical play. It is about Joyce's relation to the beautiful, uneducated girl he took off to Europe as he exiled himself from his native land. In the play she is called Bertha. When Joyce, here renamed Richard Rowan and the author of a highly esteemed book, returns to Ireland after nine years abroad, now the father of an 8-year-old son, he is visited by his onetime rival, a journalist named Robert Hand, based on Victor Cosgrave, a friend from Joyce's university days. Another character figures in the play, Beatrice Justice, Hand's Protestant cousin, with whom Rowan evidently had had an affair before he took up with Bertha.

Though still Rowan's admirer and champion, Hand nevertheless desires Bertha and is bent on possessing her. Bertha appreciates Hand's feeling without returning it in kind. Almost encouraged to do so by Rowan, she accepts Hand's advances though she is not actually tempted by them. She is, however, jealous of Rowan's former liaison with Beatrice Justice who, being an educated woman, can share Rowan's lofty concerns; Bertha is especially hurt by his continuous promiscuity.

The dramatic crux of the play comes from Hand's inviting Bertha to an assignation in his private quarters, which she is egged on to by Rowan. She accepts the challenge of the invitation. Rowan wants her to feel free as he is. He will not prevent her doing anything she wishes to do and he tells Hand the same. There is even his passing suggestion that, if Bertha were to give herself to Hand, he might feel closer to both!

In Bertha's encounter with Hand, nothing happens, except conversation. She assures Rowan of this, but we suspect that he had almost hoped as much as he feared that they had consummated their contact. (Rowan speaks of sexual union as “the death of the spirit.”) Despite Bertha's avowal of innocence and enduring love for him—her “strange, wild lover”—Rowan is wracked by jealousy. “I have a deep, deep wound of doubt in my soul,” he says. Indeed, he doubts everything. Knowing himself to be a sinner he is ridden by guilt, the old Irish-Catholic-inspired guilt which extends, except for art, to doubt of all human existence.

Though it seems forthright realism, there is a veil over the play's proceedings that no amount of straightforward acting can penetrate. Hidden behind that veil is the author's masochism and the painful mental effort to rid himself of it and the feeling of guilt which causes it. But for all Rowan-Joyce's lucidity of expression, it never brings about anything more concrete than a yowl of distress.

Everything spoken in the play could, and may have, been said in life, yet the dialogue sounds like an interpretation of, or brooding on, Joyce's past and present experiences. It is not living speech, speech uttered as things are taking place. A dramatist, no matter how poetic or stylized his play, must make us believe in the immediate reality of its action. That does not happen in Exiles, which means that Joyce is no playwright. Yet the psychological turmoil of which his play is wrought still exercises a degree of fascination, if only because it is the stuff of the author's spirit and suffering.

One need not complain of the production. It attempts a lightness which makes the play appear more overtly dramatic than it really is. To its credit, the cast—especially Neil Flanagan—plays with candid understanding. But a much more complex inwardness, a greater maturity of mind and sensibility are required to make Exiles Joycean.