Shane MacGowan will be lending his presence to the Bloomsday Lock-In, which gets its online premiere on Saturday June 20 and then runs for a week at http://www.tenthousandhours.ie/bloomsday-lockin

Asked to explain his involvement, Shane left a voice message saying: "James Joyce and Flann O’Brien are the greatest Irish writers. Why? Fuck off there is no why it just is."
You can't argue with that... He joins fellow Pogue Spider Stacy and Vikings actor and Hail The Ghost singer as some of the rock 'n' roll participants in the event.

"I'm ashamed to say the Bloomsday Lock-In was my first exposure to Joyce," says Kieran. "His work never seemed to cross my sometimes, insular world. To say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. Joyce's work is so evidently unique and so creatively rich; his provocatively lewd nature, fascinating, and his ability to interrogate the darker sides to everyday life with a captivating blunt honesty, masterful. I have become an overnight fan of James Joyce."

Adds Float Like A Butterfly and Michael Inside actor Hazel Doupe: "Joyce's work was so ahead of its time with so many underlying and very real issues woven into his stories."

Poet Theo Dorgan reflects: "Joyce was perhaps the first to treat Dublin as polyphony, a concert of voices, concordant and discordant, at cross-purposes very often, at other times singing in sweet harmony. As time goes by, this aspect of his work has taken on greater and greater significance — Paula Meehan was the first to point out that to walk through contemporary Dublin is to walk through Finnegans Wake, all the voices in the world rising and falling in the cross-rhythms and varying keys of a hymn to mundane existence. I have come to believe that in choosing exile, Joyce was not so much distancing himself from the day to day world that he feared would drag him down as achieving the distance from which he could hear, whole and entire, the layered, riverine, mountainous music of his beloved Dublin."

Due to the Covid-19 crisis, the annual Bloomsday In Brooklyn literary pub crawl is going online with John Turturro, Patrick Bergin, Aidan Gillen, Ian McElhinney, Colin Quinn, Barry Ward, Billy Carter and Paula Meehan also among the 50-strong cast beaming in from Tipperary, Limerick, Galway, Belfast, Dublin, London, Strasbourg, Paris, Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles.

Their modern adaptation of Ulysses will screen for one week only, with proceeds going to the CHiPS Soup Kitchen and Women's Shelter. You can donate at https://give.chipsonline.org/give/288238/#!/donation/checkout

"James Joyce was a modernist and this promises to be a thoroughly fresh contemporary take on the novel that nobody wanted to publish and everyone tried to ban," we're told. "This presentation favours a more dramatic conceit and will be an adaptation that features excerpts from the 1922 version of the book. Bloomsday Lock-in is a play on the current Covid-19 'lockdown' situation. A 'lock-in' in Ireland is typically when the pubs shut but allow patrons to stay drinking and carousing after hours illegally."

The above photo features actors Laoisa Sexton, Michael Badalucco, Declan Walsh who is also the Bloomsday Lock-In Director and John Turturro at a previous Bloomsday In Brooklyn event. It's safe to say that, even minus the pub crawl, this year's bash is going to be a whole lot of fun!