Never finished Ulysses? Try this production
Bolger’s Ulysses plays for laughs
Ulysses Abbey Theatre
At first it looked like a re-run of the layout for the recent Great Gatsby. The stage is set at floor level between rows of audience in front and behind, with tables and chairs onstage, and actors sitting at them mixing with the public. There are so many possibilities in Ulysses, and so many bits that are either obscure or incomprehensible, that dramatising the huge novel into a two-hour play is like trying to pour a basket of apples into a handbag. You have to choose the tasty bits and dispose of the rest.
The adaptor, Dermot Bolger, writes in a programme note that his ideal audience are people who always wanted to read Ulysses but felt daunted.
This could convince some that it might be worth the effort.
There’s plenty of racy humour in the book and Graham McLaren, one of the new Abbey artistic directors, propels it onstage as a raucous, ribald piece of revelry, with music and song that has all the bravura of naughty old-style music hall, but with none of the sexual inhibitions. The sexuality is not for delicate sensibilities.
Just eight performers and a cast of puppets take on all the roles, women sometimes dressed as men, all part of the glorious confusion. The organisation and interplay of the characters is quite a feat of choreography, although there’s such a blitz of characters coming from all angles that, at times, it was unclear who was talking.
Strolling nonchalantly through all the personalities, prejudices and anti-semitism of a single day in Dublin 1904, is David Pearse as the Jewish Leopold Bloom, who makes a living by canvassing for advertisements for newspapers. Pearse’s Bloom, is a quietly understated philosophical loner, upsetting the pub crowd by appealing to reason and science. He stands outside the political and religious animosities of Irish life, having the audacity to remind everyone that Christ was a Jew. But the masturbatory performance on Sandymount Strand while Gerty McDowell displays her underwear leaves nothing to the imagination and is excessively crude by any standard.
Bloom is matched in seriousness by the Stephen Dedalus of Donal Gallery, both of them haunted by a death; Stephen by his mother’s, Bloom by his son’s.
The famous monologue of Bloom’s wife, Molly, truncated and cleverly split into sections throughout the play, makes sense of her life, relationships and disappointments, and gives the splendid Janet Moran plenty of opportunity to display Molly’s mixture of lusty sensuality, mischievous love of life, and sexual frustration. Garrett Lombard practically takes over the stage in his scenes as Molly’s agent and lover, Blazes Boylan, and in his other roles. However, the long catechism parody at the end of the book, which can be very funny to read, doesn’t work well on stage even in its shortened form.
As a drama with no obvious beginning or end, the play may still bemuse some audiences, but it’s aimed firmly at entertainment without pretension. Although it’s obvious that, by its very nature, Ulysses can never be adequately dramatised.
The cast must be complimented for their composure when a member of the on-stage audience had to receive medical attention, and the response of two audience doctors to a call for help was admirable.