I wish I could have caught all the linguistic content – in my defense, please remember Joyce was a juggler in English – but that didn’t bother me. The power and magic of the mellifluous writing, evident even in translation, captured the attention and stretched the imagination. In the company of an eerie projected backdrop and a straw mannequin dangling over the stage, Andoura started out by reciting Joyce’s prose-poetry in English, then switched to French. With Sharif Andoura playing the narrator, director Antoine Caubert has skillfully brought to the stage death, love and life on the River Liffey with his adaptation of the first chapter of Joyce’s work at the Théâtre de l’Aquarium. The opening of the show dispelled my lily-livered condition within minutes, however. My concerns were only heightened by the cold, wet winter weather and the prospect of a trek to the Cartoucherie in the middle of the Bois de Vincennes on a Saturday night. Let the record show that I was somewhat worried about going to see James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – not the easiest read even in English – translated into French and performed onstage. Sharif Andoura in Finnegan’s Wake at Paris’s Théâtre de l’Aquarium.
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