Play: Exiles

Overview

James Joyce’s Exiles (1918), his only extant play, stages a triangular drama of love, freedom, and jealousy among Irish expatriates newly returned to Dublin. Written after Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and alongside the composition of Ulysses, the play tests the limits of trust and possession in intimate relationships. Eschewing melodrama, Joyce builds slow-burning psychological tension around whether an act of infidelity occurs, and what it would mean if it did. The result is a modernist chamber piece whose silences, evasions, and conditional truths matter as much as any spoken confession.

Setting and Characters

The action unfolds over two days in and around a seaside cottage near Dublin and in a bachelor’s rooms in the city. Richard Rowan, a writer who has spent nearly a decade on the continent, returns with Bertha, his common-law partner, and their young son, Archie. Robert Hand, a suave journalist and Richard’s old friend, embodies worldly charm and opportunism. His cousin, Beatrice Justice, once emotionally bound to Richard, remains the figure of idealized affection and moral scruple. A domestic, Brigid, and the observant Archie round out a small cast that heightens the play’s intimacy and its charged, triangulated conversations.

Plot

Act I introduces uneasy homecoming. Richard and Bertha’s return stirs dormant desires around them: Beatrice and Richard share a muted, tender understanding that stops just short of avowal, while Robert, thrilled by the Rowans’ presence, pivots toward Bertha with predatory delicacy. He sends her a passionate note proposing a clandestine meeting. Bertha shows the letter to Richard. He refuses to forbid her from going, declaring his love as a commitment to her freedom, even at the cost of his own peace. Abashed yet intrigued, Bertha teeters between reassurance at his trust and anxiety that his non-possessiveness might mask indifference.

Act II moves to Robert’s rooms. Bertha visits, half-drawn by curiosity, half-armed with fidelity. Robert presses his advantage, arguing for a liberating love unconstrained by vows. Their exchange hovers between flirtation and a test of limits. Richard arrives unexpectedly. In the scene that anchors the play’s modernist ambiguity, the men speak obliquely about what is or is not happening in the next room. Politeness hardens into duel; each prods the other’s motives. Whether Bertha yields is left deliberately uncertain. The act ends with all three suspended in a web of withheld knowledge and wounded pride.

Act III returns to the cottage after night and storm. Beatrice confesses her enduring feelings to Richard but declines to become a consolation; she chooses withdrawal over compromise. Robert and Richard face each other more frankly. Robert admits his pursuit and demands either censure or absolution. Richard withholds both. He will not wield moral authority, yet his poise does not erase pain. Finally Richard and Bertha confront the fracture. She insists that if a boundary was crossed, it went no further than a kiss; he insists he will not interrogate her. They accept a future together shadowed by unresolvable uncertainty, a pact grounded not in certainty but in the chosen risk of trust.

Themes and Ambiguity

Exiles interrogates the ethics of freedom in love: whether trust without possession dignifies the beloved or abandons them to the designs of others; whether jealousy is a base instinct or a truthful measure of attachment. The expatriate condition becomes an inner exile, living among one’s own people while estranged by intellect, memory, and desire. Joyce’s dramaturgy echoes Ibsen’s moral testing ground but strips away verdicts. No final disclosure clarifies the facts; instead, the play compels characters and audience to live with doubt as the price of autonomy. In its spare rooms, deferred answers, and tidal rhythms, Exiles makes fidelity less a state than a continuously renewed choice.