Having spent nine years in Italy, writer Richard Rowan and his de facto wife Bertha have recently returned to Dublin with their eight-year-old son Archie. Beatrice Justice, who arrives at the Rowans’ house at the play’s opening, has corresponded with Richard throughout their absence, and her appointment as his son’s piano teacher is an excuse for them to see one another. The beginnings of a relationship have also formed between Bertha and Richard’s friend the journalist Robert Hand.
Exiles , James Joyce’s only surviving play, explores without fully resolving a possible outcome of this premise. Its main themes are freedom and doubt in personal relationships, marital infidelity, and what Joyce refers to in his notes as Richard’s “spiritual abandonment” of Bertha. Without being entirely autobiographical, Exiles contains elements of Joyce’s own life: he and his wife Nora did not marry until long after their children had been born in Italy, where they too lived as “exiles” from Ireland.
Reception of Exiles was initially mixed, mostly drawing unfavorable comparisons with Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Just as he had struggled to find a publisher for Portrait and Dubliners , Joyce too struggled to find a theater willing to stage Exiles . It was sent to the Stage Society in early 1916, who then rejected it. Joyce then sent it to W. B. Yeats in the hope of acceptance at the Abbey Theatre, but Yeats also rejected it, replying that “[he did] not think it at all so good as [ Portrait ].”
The first performance of Exiles was in German in 1919 at a theater in Munich, where it was withdrawn after that single performance. It was not until 1925 that it was first staged in English, where it ran for forty-one performances in New York.
