Since 2014 Neal Kosaly-Meyer has been performing the successive chapters of Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” at the Chapel. He has always been entranced by the novel’s musicality and performs in the hope of ensnaring everyone else in that trance. The performances are theatrical and quasi-liturgical, in resonance with the Chapel’s own history, appearance, and acoustics. After December’s performance there remain only five more chapters of the total 17, so the light at the end of the tunnel is in view.
Following Part II, Chapter 3, a four and a half hour behemoth of a text, the twelfth chapter, Part II, Chapter 4, will probably take about 30 or 40 minutes to perform, the shortest chapter in the book. It is both static and meandering, the muttering associations of four old men, watching Tristan and Isolde making out in their ship’s cabin on the voyage to Cornwall, but watching from outside in the cold and the dark and the wet.