Edinburgh Fringe 2013

Ulysses

Tron Theatre

Genre: Drama

Venue: Paterson’s Land

Festival: Edinburgh Fringe

Low Down

Review

To stage Ulysses or not to… That is the question that many playwrights and dramaturges must have asked themselves over the years. Joyce’s novel, which famously takes place over a single day 16th June 1904 in Dublin, is a meander through Dublin with all its sprawling canvas of life, and through the hearts and minds of the main characters. A massive quarter of a million word modernist novel with much of the narrative being stream of consciousness, Ulysses has often been considered unadaptable for stage or screen. However, Andy Arnold for Glasgow’s Tron Theatre has taken a new version of Dermot Bolger’s 1994 adaptation of Ulysses and produced a play that is teeming, bursting with life, and a reflection of the sacred and profane territory that Joyce made his own.

Molly, Bloom’s wife, is ensconced in bed waiting for Blazes Boylan, her voice tutor and infamous philanderer. Her husband, Leopold Bloom, fully aware that his wife is expecting a bedding visit from Boylan, roams the pubs, graveyards and whorehouses of Dublin.

Leopold Bloom moves through the play, someone who is other and an observer of the variousness of Dublin life. Jean-Paul Van Cauwelaert is that constant and necessary outsider, his Jewishness and intellectual curiousity setting him apart. Caulwelaert plays Bloom as a thoughtful man enduring the pain of a son’s loss, of cuckoldry, but finding redemption in the everyday.

Muireann Kelly is Molly Bloom. For most of the play she’s in or around the bed, sensual and bawdy. She’s a huge character of a woman, a shrewd and witty commentator, who moves through life confident of her own allure. Muireann Kelly gets under her skin. Her last speech, in particular, where Molly rambles through observation to insight, through pondering to decision is a show highlight. And Molly rules that bed.

The cast is eight characters, including Leopold and Molly. They play the full array of characters, doubling up and making swift changes; mostly this works with exaggerated pantomime performances, though there are times when accents slip or the characters morph, but generally the diversity and delight which Joyce found in the multiplicity of Dublin life is given full voice here.

Charlotte Lane’s set is a huge ramshackle set of dark Victorian furniture – chest of drawers, trunks, bookcases and overflowing books. It’s a backdrop that is various enough to serve all of Bloom’s travels, and is interspersed with gaps and crevices which characters regularly pop up from. This is enhanced by exquisite lighting by Sergey Jakovsky; the lighting is absolutely integral to the performance and totally integrated into it. The day is punctuated by light rising and falling, and the different hues of the hours of the day. It has a painterly quality of chiarusco and its smokiness is evocative of Ireland’s Catholicism.

And the language! The language is there. How could you have a Ulysses that didn’t pulse with language that jumps off the page or stage and holds you in its thrall with its inventiveness and sheer brio? Joycean language like the ‘snotgreen sea’ or ‘sparrowfart’ delight as much spoken as they do on the page. Bolger seems to have taken whole passages direct from the novel. Andy Arnold’s direction allows the actors to relish the spoken word and roll Joyce’s words around the auditorium.

Does it matter if you’ve read the book? I’d say no. If you haven’t then the narrative might be a little difficult to follow, but then you’d find that with the book too, and neither book nor play are about coherent narrative. What they are about is the small moments of life, the sacred and profane, those moments of epiphany that illuminate our lives. If you have read it, then you’ll find the feel and the swagger of the book still extant and well treated.

Andy Arnold’s Ulysses is an utter delight – loud, exuberant, bustling, visually beautiful, hilarious, bawdy and full of life. I do think Joyce would have approved – it’s a real BloomPlay. 

Published August 7, 2013 by Clare Simpson