James Joyce’s Ulysses has been adapted for the Abbey Theatre by poet and novelist Dermot Bolger. John Vaughan caught the show last week, and his review can be read below.
Around this time last year, Marina Carr adapted Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for the stage, giving it a slick, colloquial slang with which to disarm and immerse a contemporary audience. Carr was not overshadowed by the Russian giant, and neither is Dermot Bolger’s vision flattened by Joyce’s in his adaptation of Ulysses. The infamous, sprawling novel covers just about everything, big and small, no stone unturned and scrutinized; and so it makes sense that everyone should be able to enjoy it. The novel’s reputation for being too difficult, however, has isolated readers, and this is something Bolger has sought to fix. Bolger states that his ideal audience are those who have always wanted to read the book but have felt too daunted to approach it. That fear of exclusion dies the second you see the set: audience members are encouraged to sit at the tables onstage as if they were at the local pub knocking back pints with Stephen Dedalus, and the stage is flanked by an audience on either side: a panorama to match Joyce’s hungry, sweeping scope. Throughout the play, interactions between audience and actor reaffirm the universal nature of Bloom’s story, deleting any sense of inferiority.
Molly Bloom is centre-stage, lying in bed and rising into bursts of voracious monologue throughout the play. Rather than leave her glorious celebration of life till the end, Bolger decides to hand her the reins: she kicks off the play by lying down to sleep beside her husband, and what ensues is a dreamlike romp through Dublin, punctured by her rockets of solipsism. While dealing with heavy subjects such as grief, politics, and sex, Bolger’s play giddily skips into near-slapstick humour, highlighting the comedy of Joyce’s novel in characters such as “Blazes Boylan,” who reduces barmaids to quivering swoons and who strides to trombone toots like a cartoon villain. While the first half towers above the second in terms of outrageous comedy and pithy remarks (Stephen Dedalus bellows in lamenting tones, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake”), Molly Bloom’s ecstatic end to her monologue is like a jolt of electricity, with all the force and drama of an aria sung from her comfort in bed. If nothing else, Bolger manages to remind us that we are our own worlds, capable of supreme joy if only we seize it.
