Joyceana around Bloomsday, Dublin review - flawless adaptations of great dramatic writing

It amuses me that Dubliners dress up in Edwardian finery on 16 June. After all, this was the date in 1904 when James Joyce first walked out with Nora Barnacle and, putting her hand inside his trousers, she “made me a man”. So it’s National Handjob Day. But Bloomsday too, celebrating the jaunts of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom over 24 hours around Dublin, the song of a great city in Ulysses.

This year four adaptations proved how Joyce is to be heard and acted out, perhaps creating an even more vivid impression than simply reading him. The little company of actors with big ambitions called Volta, after the cinema Joyce ran in Dublin for a mere seven months from December 1909 with support from sponsors in Trieste (on Bloomsday evening, the Irish Film Institute ran six silents screened there, with lively accompaniment from Morgan Cooke), hit the dramatic nail on the head each time. What should become an annual fixture, as the masterly walkabout production of "The Dead" from Dubliners set in Newman House on St Stephen's Green seems set to be at the other end of the year, is the shining success of "Telemachus", the first chapter of Ulysses, directed by Liam Hourican, set on top of and inside the Martello Tower at Sandycove, the free-to-visit James Joyce Museum which has supported these productions, as well as the Forty Foot bathing place below, as Joyce imagined them. We encounter "stately, plump Buck Mulligan" in "yellow dressinggown, ungirdled", on the "round gunrest", and Stephen Dedalus a little later.

Many were lucky, as I was, to find "warm sunshine merrying over the sea" (several days saw non-stop rain). Both actors fill out the nuances of their characters, enriching Joyce's already piquant and pithy dialogue: Oliver Flitcroft as a charismatic Buck (pictured above), bullish, insensitive but good with words and clearly having some animal hold over his short-term disciple; Darragh Shannon consummate in showing us Stephen's inner and outer responses. Down in the "gloomy domed livingroom of the tower" we also meet Haines as Mulligan prepares breakfast - Dan Mahon, sounding slightly Germanic as a putative Englishman, but a good third contrast - and Mother Grogan with the milk who thinks Haines's Irish is French (Geraldine Plunkett, pitch-perfect). We get some of Stephen's dialogue with Haines outside the tower as Buck heads down to the Forty Foot (pictured above) and plunges to end the play, as many of us were to do around it (no nudity: this is now a mixed bathing place, not Men Only). 

Pure innocence played brilliantly to schooldchildren in the performance studio of Dún Laoghaire's state of the art Lexicon Library, the biggest in Ireland; it was good to have an introduction from a member of staff encouraging the kids to read throughout the summer, and telling their teachers how to facilitate it. The little singspiel was a musical version of the French legend about supernatural happenings in Beaugency Joyce adapted in 1934 for his grandson Stevie, The Cat and the Devil. Morgan Cooke wrote the songs, perfectly delivered mostly in three-part harmony with two musical instruments for atmosphere, and played a Gallic devil, among other roles; his accomplices were Zita Monahan McGowan as Mayor and Molly Mew as Marianne De Microphone (all three pictured above), who in a piquant twist wields a boom mic which may or may not be the catalytic cat of the story (read the outcome for yourselves in book form; no spoilers). 

Volta wielded an augmented team for an even shorter slice of Ulysses in the same space: "Cyclops", a mere halfhour's worth but richer in dramatic variety than the whole of Conor MacPherson's long new play The Brightening Air, which I'd seen in London the previous week. Hourican acts in this one, brazenly contrasting with an even bigger loudmouth, the one-eyed Citizen, partly based on xenophobic nationalist Michael Cusack^{. Jim Roche's comic roaring turns nasty in slurring Leopold Bloom, whose Jewishness he maligns; gives another nuanced performance, by Danny Kehoe, as a quiet man goaded to confrontation (the topicality will always be there). Shannon resurfaces, blowing the dust off a big book, as a second narrator. This drama could be filled out on its return, but it's already rich indeed for its short running time (pictured above in rehearsal: Roche sans eyepatch, Flitcroft and Hourican).}

The proven success from last year was the twinning of two short stories from Dubliners, playing this year in the cafe theatre on the second floor of Bewley's in Grafton Street. Framed and punctuated by a perfect choice of music Joyce woukld have known, from Schumann to Fauré and Satie, by top clarinettist Conor Shiel and pianist/violinist Feillimidh Nunan, both of them appearing in "Cyclops" too (there Shiel brilliantly impersonated the Citizen's "savage animal of the canine tribe"; in "A Little Cloud", his was the fractiousness of the first protagonist's baby). The two pictured below with Hourican in the distance. Hourican and Roche, adapting the texts as monologues, sometimes duologues, and superbly, play two very different clerks: Hourican's sensitive stutterer Little Chandler longs for the rackety, peripatetic life of old friend Gallaher - a blusterer, Hourican makes clear, when they meet at Corless's.

Little Chandler's homecoming, to a wife and child, is very different from that of the protagonist in "Counterparts" (Roche pictured below), in which Joyce painstakingly shows us by degrees how the put-upon can take out rage and frustration on those still weaker in a horrifying conclusion. Children feature in both very different conclusions.Both actors do all the voices impeccably, and the whole is evocatively lit, with more telling parallels, by Colm Maher. Clearly Bewley's Cafe Theatre is a special place: in a couple of weeks Barry McGovern, whose reading of the complete Ulysses over a week two years ago will remain a highlight of my theatregoing life, and Michael James Ford play cricket as Beckett and Pinter in Shomit Dutta's Stumped. But Bloomsday, from my transgressive Leopold Bloom breakfast of "the inner organs of beasts and fowls" in Kennedy's to the comic, portmanteau-epic and mini-documentary silents from Joyce's Volta Cinema time, is over for another year. 

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