A new play Guilt written and directed by Brisbane-based playwright Lisa Maree Southgate will showcase on Sunday 21 June and compares 21st Century parenting to the experiences of Irish writer James Joyce. This date is resonant for Joyce fans who know it as Bloomsday, a day dedicated to celebrating the life of James Joyce.
James Joyce, acclaimed author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, was the parent of a child with an acute mental illness, believed to be schizophrenia. Southgate wrote Guilt after being struck by the similarity between Joyce and today’s parents of hard-to-launch adult children. “Joyce swam rather awkwardly between work, parenting, caring,” says Southgate, herself the parent of an adult child with special needs. “He struggled between the delicate, ethereal work of writing Finnegans Wake, and the material task of shepherding his daughter towards adulthood. And it confounded him. Lucia was a particularly volcanic patient. She would physically attack her mother. She set fire to things. She would go missing for days. And this was in a time before the psychotropic drugs were in play. Joyce believed he could save Lucia with art and parental love. He took her to more than 20 doctors and plotted to keep her out of institutions.”
Southgate stumbled on Joyce’s story of parental guilt when her own son, for different reasons, was having a challenging time launching into adulthood. “The conditions were very different but the sense of parental powerlessness was very familiar, and would be to any parent of a teenager or adult child whether the problem is disability, addiction, or anything else standing in the way of child trying to make it to adulthood.”
After the play was short-listed for the Rodney Seaborn Playwright’s Award in 2018, Southgate knew it was time to get Guilt on its feet. This first performance has attracted a cast of talented actors, headed by Sean Dennehy as Joyce and Alex Lanham as Carl Jung. Rising stars Matthew Caffoe, Tamara Bailey, Jennifer Laycock, and Joel Cummerford will complete the ensemble.
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