Is it time for Joyce’s Exiles to come in from the cold? Joyce’s only extant play has long been marginal within his oeuvre, scantly loved even by Joyce enthusiasts, and seldom produced for stage. Bloomsday in Melbourne, which has been making live theatrical adaptations of James Joyce’s prose work for some thirty years, has only got round to putting it on now, the first ever production in Victoria. Written in 1915, between A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, the play is deeply coloured by Joyce’s early infatuation with Henrik Ibsen (the nineteen-year-old Joyce famously learned Norwegian to read the master in the original). Critics have long been put off by its lack of dramatic action and the unwieldy dialogue, encased in a fusty Edwardian drawing-room setting.