James Joyce began his novel Finnegan’s Wake in 1924 publishing it in instalments with the final book only being published in 1939. Joyce’s radical reworking of language in the book was initially received with bafflement and open hostility. Its allusive and experimental style has resulted in it having a reputation as one of the most difficult works in literature.
Now composer Alastair White is planning to adapt Finnegan’s Wake for the musical stage. White has very clear intentions when it comes to the project. He seeks to capture the joyful, multidimensional beauty of Joyce’s text. He explains how “central to the adaptation’s approach is a radical re-reading of Finnegans Wake and the modernist canon: that authors such as Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway continue to be misread through romantic and post-modern analyses that sees them as depths rather than surfaces. The project contends that — like the sparse prose of Hills Like White Elephants — Finnegans Wake has been ill-used by approaches that attempt to ‘decode’ it through what is absent: in ignorance of the sheer joy that the language embodies. There is no iceberg, no skeleton key; Finnegans Wake is not a cipher. It is only itself.”
As part of Irish Design Week, Alastair White and his creative partner and wife, Tipperary-born curator Gemma A. Williams, will be in residence at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum, Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary, Ireland from 17 to 23 November 2025. The week-long residency, selected as part of Design & Crafts Council Ireland’s flagship initiative, invites audiences to see opera in the making and witness how literature, theatre, fashion and music can intersect and redesign one another. Education lies at the heart of the open studio, which includes talks, practical workshops and an outreach programme. The residency runs in the heart of Cloughjordan: home of the poet Thomas MacDonagh, whose teacher parents taught in the local school.
Further information from the Design & Crafts Council Ireland website.
