The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies—on Part II of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce—lasts about an hour. It is for soprano, tenor and baritone, seven female voices and six male, with an instrumental group of 13 players: flutes, oboes, clarinet (doubling contrabass clarinet), bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, 2 trombones, percussion, keyboards, cello and bass. There is also a ‘Manager’—either ‘live’ or on tape. The text selected is from a comparatively self-contained section of Finnegans Wake, separately published by Joyce as a fragment under this name in 1934 but now just the first section of Part 11, sometimes referred to as the Children's Night Games. It fuses children's games with life/sexual games, describing humiliation and extreme loneliness and the realizing creative power of building from these with the mythologies of the fall, of parenthood and of the family, with jealousy and incest, closing with the almost central Joycean prayer: ‘Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low’. In it, the two sons of HCE, Shem and Shaun, now as children called Glugg and Chuff, are outside their father's pub in the evening with their sister Issy and her seven girl friends (though they sometimes disturbingly multiply into a lunar monthly 28). The game is Angels and Devils and Glugg is the devil, Chuff Saint Michael, whilst the girl/angels or harpy/maggies think of a colour—but twist it to the colour of their knickers. Heliotrope is the rather unlikely colour and three times Glugg is allowed to advance and try three guesses.