Saturday 14 September | 7pm | Round Room | James Joyce Tower | €10

To celebrate the 120th anniversary of James Joyce’s stay in the Sandycove Martello Tower, the renowned actor Barry McGovern will read three of the fables included in the text of Finnegans Wake: The Prankquean, The Mookse and the Gripes and The Ondt and the Gracehoper.

Barry McGovern is an actor who has a particular reputation as an interpreter of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. He played Stephen Dedalus in Stephen D., Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero, at the Abbey Theatre in 1978; Buck Mulligan in Blooms of Dublin, Anthony Burgess’s musical adaptation of Ulysses on RTE and BBC radio in 1982; Jimmy (James Joyce) in The Saints Go Cycling In, Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive at the Gate Theatre in 1984. For Athena Media he has recorded The Dead, and, with Sam McGovern, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He has read Ulysses in its entirety, episode by episode, at the Joyce Tower on many Bloomsdays from 1989 to 2011. He read it complete again over seven days at the Peacock Theatre for the book’s centenary in 2022 finishing on Bloomsday. He has recorded the complete Finnegans Wake for Naxos with Marcella Riordan.