Scholars of James Joyce (one of which I am assuredly not) may be interested in a chance discovery in the archival collections of the National University of Ireland Galway. Obscured by an incomplete catalogue record is the existence of adaptations for the stage of three of the stories in Joyce’s Dubliners, one of which at least was produced by the Lyric Players in Belfast in March 1963.

File T4/75 in the Lyric Theatre/O’Malley archive is catalogued as concerning a triple-bill production of plays by W.B. Yeats, J.M.Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory. On examination of the file, the programme states that the production was in fact of four plays rather than three. The fourth was an adaptation of ‘Grace’, one of the stories in Dubliners, made by Maureen O’Farrell and James O’Connor. In the same file there is a script of the same that establishes the point. O’Farrell (later Maureen Charlton) was involved in the Belfast theatrical scene, and adapted Synge’s Playboy of the Western World as a musical. The file also contains a number of photographs of the production of ‘Grace’.

In the same file there is a second script, typed on the same yellow paper, with a missing first page. This appears to be a similar adaptation of ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room,’, also from Dubliners. However, it doesn’t seem to have been produced, although it was presumably considered.

If my identification is correct, it also makes sense of file T4/432 in the same archive, which contains a third adaptation in the same typescript on the same yellow paper of ‘The Dead’, a third Dubliners story. The catalogue records this as of an unknown adaptor, although it seems likely that this was also the work of O’Farrell and O’Connor.

It may be that these adaptations are well known to Joyce scholars; but I record them here in case they are not.