Ulysses

The Mac, Belfast **

THE IDEA of adapting a work as sprawling, Byzantine and shape shifting as James Joyce’s Ulysses as a stage play is, of course, preposterous – perhaps as wild as the idea of adapting Homer’s Odyssey for a novel.

Rather than simply picking the plot out of Joyce’s text, though, or extracting dialogue from quotation marks, the real challenge facing his adapters is to find theatrical correspondents for his “many enigmas and puzzles that will keep the professors busy for centuries”.

On the evidence of Tron Theatre’s staging of Dermot Bolger’s “freely adapted” A Dublin Bloom from 1994, now revised and retitled, our wait for someone to accept that challenge continues.

Bolger’s main problem, paradoxically, is his faithfulness. Most episodes of the novel and characters have been accounted for, slimmed down and parsed, which is itself a heroic undertaking. But the play is almost too burdened by such duty to move freely. Instead, it resembles a series of solutions to a set of problems. Confined by stage space, how can you conjure up one day’s journey across a city, from the warmth of Molly Bloom’s bed to the reek of an outhouse, from a Gorgonzola sandwich in Davy Byrne’s bar to a shattered chandelier in Bella Cohen’s brothel?

Bolger frames his play as a fragmented recollection of the day’s events, where Bloom is commanded to “dream it all again” and Molly’s concluding stream of consciousness is instead punctuated and parcelled throughout the play, in a form of onstage narration. What is radical on the page becomes merely conventional on the stage.

Similarly, director Andy Arnold struggles to find theatrical devices commensurate with the novel’s playful intelligence, favouring the whirl of multiple role-play and a series of conjuring tricks – where a bowler hat may float up from the ground, a cat is indicated with the swoosh of a tail, or a ghostly apparition appears through a mirror.

This would all seem more lively if an uneven cast, many preoccupied with their accents, did not seem so curiously enervated.

Instead of seeing things through Bloom’s eyes, though, we simply see Bloom – on the surface, a cuckolded, mourning, concupiscent and banal figure. That may be why John-Paul Van Cauwelaert can’t find much in the role other than a soft sense of suffering, and why it seems so dumbly reductive when Arnold has this Dublin Jew, in one hounded moment, adopt a crucifixion pose.

Things get more appropriately surreal for Bloom’s encounter with Stephen Dedalus in Nighttown, and although the sequence is undercooked and overlong, the heart of the play is in their mutual recognition as intellectual outcasts. But little distracts from one nagging question: who is this show for? Too often it seems like just a brisk vehicle for a simplified retelling; a theatrical Cliffs Notes. With Joyce’s works now in the public domain, this year has brought a glut of adaptations and just as many lessons. If the first question is what an adaptation must lose, the endeavour seems pointless. If the question is what it can add, there may be some hope.

At the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, November 6th to 10th and the Everyman, Cork, November 12th to 17th