In Joyce's story, Leopold Bloom navigates an unhappy marriage and Stephen Dedalus searches to elevate everyday heartache into epic poetry
★ ★ ★
Somewhere on Sandymount Strand, after a day agonising over his wife’s extramarital affair, Leopold Bloom’s thoughts ebb back to his sweet, early days with Molly Bloom. “Longest way round is the shortest way home,” he thinks, their history opened like a new discovery.
That adage might also summarise Ulysses, a modernist novel so gargantuan with detail, its author once joked it could rebuild Dublin if it were ever demolished. The RTÉ Players' radio adaptation from 1982, rebroadcasted as part of the Bloomsday Festival, comes in at a staggering 29½ hours. Only the adventure drama Moon Over Morocco, from New York’s prestige on-air playhouse ZBS, might come within spitting distance with its 10-hour running time.
This really is a time-capsule. Directed by William Styles (an acolyte of Hilton Edwards), the production is woven by experienced, crystal-cut voices. Patrick Dawson’s scholarly Stephen Dedalus prepares to give a lecture on Hamlet at the National Library but, in his echoey interior thoughts, he is preoccupied with the ghost of his recently dead mother. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape,” he says.
Stephen isn’t the only one anxious for an escape, as several characters scramble to rewrite Ireland’s past and plan its future. We get an Anglophile headmaster claiming the Orange Order attempted to repeal the Act of Union. Stephen’s anti-clerical enemy Buck Mulligan intends to “hellenise” the island. Most stark are the anti-Semitic remarks endured by Bloom (Ronnie Walsh, lilting towards the character's Hungarian background), silently taking abuse from others, before taking a stand against his gruesome barroom attacker, The Citizen. “A nation is the same people living in the same place,” says Bloom, with touching courage.
Styles’s production is similarly cosmopolitan, its Dublin tinted with shades of otherworldly places, of Homer’s Greece and Shakespeare’s Elsinore. How it - or any adaptation - can accommodate Joyce’s wild literary experiments is another story.
The word-by-word adaptation, guided by text consultant Roland McHugh, sounds a sureness of voice through the gibberish. But how the devil to you deliver the stream-of-consciousness wanderings of the “Proteus” episode (an unfocused saunter down Sandymount Strand), the stacked parodies of “Oxen of the Sun” (a drunken, incoherent bender at a maternity hospital) and the ceaseless third-person narration in some parts? The radio play becomes as impassable as a brick wall.
It’s no surprise that the “Circe” episode, presented in the novel as a playscript, is the most dynamic outing here. The action in these epic, twilit hours in Monto brothels takes place between reality and illusion, through hallucinations of court trials and historic wars, accumulating in a moment where Dublin itself gets blown to pieces. But it’s the protective Bloom, swooping in to save a beaten Stephen, which leaves the biggest impact.
The unfortunate thing about Joyce’s abstraction is that it too often washes out the contrasting shades of Bloom and Stephen, one’s thought-out navigation through an unhappy marriage, the other’s search to elevate everyday heartache into epic poetry. Both lose their distinct voice, subordinated instead to experimental literary forms. Extracting and separating them, in the words of Bloom’s grandfather (a welcome Christopher Casson), makes your “brain go snap”.
A saving catch is made by Styles’s decision to punctuate the final, freewheeling “Penelope” episode, giving Pegg Monaghan’s raspy Molly Bloom a coherent finale. Laying bare the entirety of her marriage, its disappointments and rekindled sparks, the achievement seems to be that of Ulysses itself, distilling vast, epic history and containing it within a single story.
Available at rte.ie/ulysses.
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