Joyce's Women

*Joyce’s Women *, the opening production of the Dublin theatre festival, is an event. Edna O’Brien raises her arms to accept the enthusiastic applause of audience, actors and the president of the republic at Dublin’s Abbey theatre. O’Brien’s career is garlanded with prizes. Even so, this surely must be an especially sweet moment for the author whose first novel, The Country Girls, was banned in her native Ireland when it came out in 1960; it was even, as she remembers in a recent interview, “spoken against from the altar steps”.