After the great success of her performance at the Teatro Quique San Francisco in Madrid and her subsequent tour around Spain, Magüi Mira Molly Bloom returns from tomorrow until the 8th of January to play the famous character from James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Magüi Mira, a tireless actress and director, a benchmark on the Spanish stage, embodies the mythical character of Molly Bloom without filter or gag. She takes hold of her words one hundred years later to turn them into a weapon of freedom for women in the 21st century.
Molly Bloom lives a sleepless night in her old iron bed. Her free and private thoughts fly with humour and shamelessness to her deepest desires. Molly, intelligent and wild, wants her right to be sexually satisfied, wants her right to be valued as an artist, demands her space in that rigid world of the early 20th century where Joyce brought her into being.
What is a woman, James Joyce surely wondered when he wrote the last chapter of his Ulysses. 24,000 words. Without full stops or commas. And like a bold man he entered Molly’s thoughts. Thought that he defined as sweeping and trembling with sheer contradiction. And when he managed to publish it on 22 February 1922, 100 years ago, his readers came face to face with an incomprehensible, unclassifiable Molly, a woman they could not encapsulate, nor could they encapsulate the female condition. A married woman could not think like that. They were horrified at the shamelessness of a woman stumbling through the streets of her life, a life she knew to be inexplicably unfair. Her soul-stirring cries, out of an urgent need for clean oxygen, shook the souls of many women and men who then avidly read the essential novel of the 20th century: Joyce’s Ulysses. Tickets can be purchased at this link.
