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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
60 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 61
The Other Side
of Failure
Lucy McCabe reviews
Deirdre Mulrooney’s ‘Full
Capacity’: correcting the
narrative of what led gifted
Lucia Joyce into, and then
out of, modern dance
L
ucia Anna Joyce (1907–1982) was
a cultivated and adept Irish
danseuse, second child of literary
modernist James Joyce and Nora
Barnacle. Raised in Trieste, she
acquired Italian as her primary tongue before
immersing herself in the avant-garde
discipline of rhythmic movement.
She trained rigorously at the Dalcroze
Institute in Paris under luminaries such as
Jacques Dalcroze, Margaret Morris, and
Raymond Duncan.
Her artistic trajectory included a minor yet
significant role in Jean Renoir’s The Little
Match Girl and membership in Les Six de
rythme et couleur, an experimental dance
collective performing across Europe.
Critics heralded her as a singular talent,
with The Paris Times envisioning her as a
prodigious force independent of her father’s
literary legacy. She reached the finals of the
inaugural international dance festival in
Paris, captivating audiences, including
Samuel Beckett with whom, at 21, she had a
relationship which he later said was rooted
in his desire to get closer to her father. She
renounced her professional aspirations at
22, citing physical limitations.
Her later years were overshadowed by
psychiatric affliction, culminating in a
schizophrenia diagnosis. Institutionalised
from the mid-1930s, she spent the remainder
of her life in psychiatric confinement,
residing at St Andrew’s Hospital,
Northampton, from 1951 until her death in
1982.
‘Full Capacity’ by Deirdre Mulrooney
embodies some of the diversity and flexibility
of approach that we have come to expect
from works that explore her life. At once
alternative biography, dance history, veiled
manifesto, literary essay and overdue work
of scholarship, this is also a call to political
arms.
The extraordinary dancer and famously
‘dicult’ daughter of James Joyce has given
rise to various adaptations and
interpretations over recent years, some more
grounded in fact than others.
Among them, viewers will recognise Lucia
as the spurned love interest in 2023’s Gabriel
Byrne-led biopic of Samuel Beckett, ‘Dance
First’ – the comic relief in an otherwise
serious literary life.
On another axis, Mulrooney herself filmed
Evanna Lynch in full dance attire, recreating
the younger Joyce’s original movements in
the short film, also called Full Capacity.
Mulrooney’s new play in development,
‘Brancusi Bird’, explores Lucia’s life in Paris
further, oering yet another take on the life
and work of this complex figure.
But before that, in her guise as a dance
historian, Deirdre Mulrooney was one of the
first to broach the topic of the real Lucia. The
original publication of the content in ‘Full
Capacity’ gave rise to countless other works
(including some from me).
What distinguishes Mulrooney’s work
from that of others in film, theatre, and
fiction, in this boom of interest in the younger
Joyce’s personality, is her celebration of the
archive. And it’s the solid foundation from
which she claims a vast enterprise: the
insertion of Lucia Joyce into Ireland’s latent
dance history.
What follows is a fascinating investigation,
made vivid through letters and other sources
– histories and viva voce – that connects some
of the most influential voices of the time.
The key players include Thomas
MacGreevy, a poet championed by TS Eliot
and an unlikely tastemaker in European
dance criticism; WB Yeats and Georgie Yeats,
who were instrumental in the ideation of an
Irish dance company at the Abbey Theatre,
which sought to mirror or rival the Ballets
Russes; and other well-worn personas from
Lucia Joyce’s biography — from her father,
James, to her contemporary Samuel Beckett,
whose role in her life was far from fleeting.
What Mulrooney achieves is a
reorganisation of the facts that gently
unravels the traditional interpretation: that
Lucia Joyce was a mad figure and
unsuspecting muse for the more successful
men around her.
Instead, we encounter a woman with
serious intent and commitment to dance,
who, like many artists of the time, was
marginalised by prevailing ideas of what a
young woman ought to be.
CULTURE
60 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 61
echoed the style and influences of Yeat’s
Plays for Dancers performed by Japanese
dancer Michio Ito. The audience’s calls for
‘l’irlandaise’ to take home the prize suggest
that, at least in this arena, Lucia was a
crowd favourite if not the ocial winner.
Was this performance, with its ‘subtle’,
‘barbaric’ chant recalling Yeats’ poem ‘The
Glimmering Girl’ (which featured in his
Nobel Prize award ceremony), another sign
of the anity between the younger Joyce’s
European training and the Abbey Theatre’s
leanings? Could Lucia have been bound for
a return to Ireland amidst the Celtic
reinvigoration of the arts?
While James Joyce remains one of
Ireland’s most famous exiles, it is easy to
forget that Lucia Joyce was an exile of her
time as well. In this sense, we might find
more in common between her and modern
figures of revisionist biopics and
documentary films like Edna O’Brien and
Sinéad O’Connor, than with her
contemporaries like Samuel Beckett, who
included impressions of her ‘dream-dive’ in
his own fiction under the Italianised persona
of the ‘Syra-Cusa’.
With much of her papers and artworks
missing by the decision of the Joyce family,
Lucia Joyce could never be the author of her
own life in the way that O’Brien or O’Connor
were able to be. Without the work of artists
and scholars like Mulrooney, Lucia might
have remained a figure whose life was
written about solely from the unforgiving
perspectives of the time.
However, what Mulrooney achieves in this
hybrid book of academic investigation,
speculative prose, and a less-than-veiled
call to action, is to shift our understanding
of Lucia Joyce. Rather than remaining a mere
muse for male artists, she is reimagined as
a serious artist in her own right.
‘Full Capacity’ is engaging, informative,
and richly illustrated with photographs and
sketches from Lucia’s own hand, helping us
to reimagine what has been absent from
history and hopefully add to our present.
Along with Full Capacity, which shows in the
Volta Room of the James Joyce Centre, works
to look out for include Áine Stapleton’s
dance films, Joseph Chester’s album for
guitar and strings Fragments of Lucia, and
an upcoming biopic by Alexandra
McGuinness.
This book is further evidence of what a
healthy collaboration between scholars and
artists can bring as we take that long look
back at forgotten stories, starting with
Lucia.
and the teachers often give classes in
hospitals for people with disabilities.
Couldn’t Lucia benefit enormously from
this, relive and recapture if not her hopes
and dreams, at least the beautiful,
privileged moments of her youth? With her
body and spirit thus taken up with dancing
her obsessions could be quelled, even for a
short time”.
What rings out as unmet potential today
highlights a widespread difficulty in
acknowledging the connection between
emotional expression and creativity — an
issue seen in the institutionalisation of
some of Lucia’s heroes, like Nijinsky, and
the depressive episodes of Samuel Beckett,
which faced no such reactionary medical
intervention.
Lucia Joyce, like the other dancers of her
circle, would have been well aware of the
connection between the arts and health,
and perhaps seen dance as a form of
potential healing.
Between family conflict and systemic
problems in healthcare, we are left with the
sense that, had circumstances shifted,
Lucia Joyce might not only have avoided her
lengthy institutionalisation in France and
England, but might have also contributed to
the Yeatsian project of establishing an Irish
tradition of modern dance — which
wasalready flourishing on the continent and
in London.
One parallel Mulrooney draws brings us
from the Abbey’s dance aspirations in
Dublin to Lucia’s peak as a dancer in Paris,
performing at the 1929 Bal Bullier dance
festival in a self-made fish costume that
It is unsurprising that some of her
champions would include George Antheil,
the ‘bad boy’ of modern music, or Berenice
Abbott, the photographer who challenged
Man Ray and immortalised Lucia in pose in
her studio—the image that now graces most
Lucia Joyce biographical content.
The book traces Lucia’s journey from the
aspirational Abbey Theatre ballet project in
Dublin to the vibrant dance scene in Paris,
building a solid case for her significant
successes amid the external failures she
faced.
As a key player in the radical dance
troupe Les Six de Rythme et Couleur, Joyce
was preparing for a career of untold
potential betrayed by the inadequacies of
the health system at the time. It’s a failure
that echoes in our contemporary treatment
and misunderstanding of mental illness.
As Lucia’s friend and fellow dancer,
Dominique Maroger, would say of Lucia’s
predicament, spending the majority of her
youth and final years in a Northampton
asylum:
“In this medical environment every eort
at expressing feelings is considered
dangerous. Here, you kill time, you don’t
live. Any attempts to relieve the favourable
numbness that maintains the equilibrium of
the patients and the institution are to be
avoided at all costs. All spirit of creativity is
completely banned. Why not allow dance
here? The system created by Margaret
Morris is well established across England.
There are so many Margaret Morris
Movement centres all around the country,
Luci
