Calico

This new play concerns the passionate relationship between James Joyce’s troubled daughter Lucia and the playwright Samuel Beckett. The romance was at its height in 1928, and only Nora Barnacle knew about it. She kept the relationship, which was probably never consummated, from her husband. The novelist only found out about it later. Lucia, who was considered very unstable by her parents and was seen by the psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1934, spent her last 20 years in a nursing home in Nottingham where she died in 1982, aged 75. She had earlier been befriended by an English lady, Jane Lidderdale, who became what virtually amounted to her guardian. The title of the play, Calico, comes from the cotton which is sometimes put around the wrists of those who are taken off to mental homes.