Actors Paul O'Hanrahan, Mick Greer, Chris Bilton together with musician John Goudie make up Balloonatics Theatre Company.

Their show takes the form of a dramatised reading which serves as a platform for theatrical performances designed to animate Joyce’s text so as to enhance its appeal to students and newcomers to Joyce. At the same time, the juxtaposition of work from Dubliners and Ulysses offers scope for comparison that will challenge and intrigue those already familiar with Joyce’s work. The 75-minute duration of the piece provides time for questions afterwards. 

Balloonatics is a Dublin-based theatre company which emerged out of an award-winning production of Circe, from Joyce’s Ulysses, at the 1983 Edinburgh Festival, in which Mick Greer took the lead role and Paul O’Hanrahan directed. From early days as Cambridge University students, the pair have acted together many times since on a range of Joyce adaptations including Nightfall from Finnegans Wake and the Cyclops episode from Ulysses. Cyclops was produced at the Joyce centenary in Dublin in 2004, the Old Vic Theatre in London in 2005 and a year later at the Merriman Summer School, in Lisdoonvarna, County Clare.

Paul and Mick teamed up again in Dublin to present Joycean theatre for Bloomsday 2012 and gave a seminar on ‘Performing Finnegans Wake’ at the International Joyce Symposium in Trinity College, Dublin. In 2014 they performed two stories from Joyce’s Dubliners on an EFACIS tour of universities in Portugal including Lisbon, Porto and Braga.

Profile photo shows Paul and Mick in a scene from 'Counterparts', a short play from the story in the collection Dubliners by James Joyce.

Photo credit: Sarah Clancy