All Hardest of Woman: Sad tales of loss in the corridors of a maternity hospital
Visitors and staff are rattled in a dance-play, staged inside Holles Street hospital.
The National Maternity Hospital, Dublin Theatre Festival
★★★★☆
One hundred years on, Ulysses remains peerless in its gargantuan detail. Some coverage of its centenary has honed in on James Joyce’s vision of an “encyclopaedic” novel, an epic that invites readers to pick up on certain themes that repeat (“Desire.” “Love.”), like entries without an index – you have to find them yourself.
If there was a listing for “childbirth,” you’d have to go to the fourteenth chapter “Oxen of the Sun,” where Leopold Bloom visits a family friend Mrs. Purefoy giving birth in Holles Street maternity hospital, but gets sidetracked into joining a group of lewd men in a rambling discussion about women and pregnancy. (Joyce’s wild conceit, writing the chapter via nine different literary styles as a metaphor for nine months of gestation, doesn’t make things less garrulous). Mrs. Purefoy and others involved in the delivery of her son are left out of sight.
For her superb new dance-play All Hardest of Woman, inspired by “Oxen of the Sun,” playwright-director Louise Lowe drives towards greater clarity. She has novelist Emilie Pine to aid her; while writer-in-residence at the hospital, Pine gathered a wealth of research from interviewing staff and patients. It makes for a bold response – as part of the Ulysses 2.2 programme curated by ANU, Landmark Productions and MoLI – that presents child loss as something that devastates family, but also rattles doctors, and shakes the hospital itself.