Bloomsday in Melbourne presents "Between The Lines: The James Joyce/Groucho Marx Letters" at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Wednesday 17th-Sunday 21st June 2026 Bloomsday is the day readers around the world celebrate with Dubliners one of the great novels of the twentieth century, James Joyce's 'Ulysses', set in 1904, and published in 1922. The novel is witty, bizarre, surreal, learned and humane
, and it gives us Dublin and its citizens in all their gritty reality, and their wry and romantic responsiveness to music. The novel explores the intimate lives of ordinary Dubliners: the young poet Stephen who sings Elizabethan love-lyrics while mentally reviling women; Bloom, temporarily displaced and cuckolded, by his wife Molly's concert manager, Blazes Boylan, but who nonetheless worries that she might need tuition in Italian to make the most of the duet from Don Giovanni she sings with his rival; bed-loving Molly's mind is supersaturated with the music of Spain, nostalgic lovesongs, and hymns to Mary. Boylan, is built for vaudeville, while others traverse the stage-Irish repertoire and rebel songs of nationalist Ireland.
'Ulysses' is an urban novel, set in a city which sits athwart a bay and a river, as does Melbourne. Events are located in different parts of Melbourne each year and attempts are made to connect place and events in Joyce's novel.
