When Dermot Bolger was first approached to write a stage adaptation of
Ulysses, James Joyce's epic free-form novel set on the streets of
Dublin, the playwright and novelist's immediate reaction was one of
“sheer palpable terror,” as he remembers it some eighteen years later.
“The novel is 265,000 words long, so to adapt something like that for
the stage is a huge thing to do. But I remember that I was initially
terrified of writing plays and poems at all, so I try and do the things
I'm terrified of.”
Bolger has had to wait until Andy Arnold's forthcoming production at
the Tron to see a full staging of his terror-induced take on Joyce's
modernist classic, which charts a life in the day of Leopold Bloom via
an experimental stream of consciousness technique that both scandalised
and revolutionised contemporary literature. Bolger's original
commission from the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, where Joyce's
original manuscript is stored, came at a time when the novel was
presumed to be out of copyright, and subsequently free of any
restrictions imposed by the keepers of the Joyce estate.
“It came about at a period of time when copyright law in Britain and
Ireland were different,” Bolger remembers. “Then the European Union
harmonised them, so Ulysses was briefly out of copyright, then it went
back in. but plays are like greyhounds. They can lose momentum on the
second bend, but then they have a way of coming back.”
Up until now, although originally mooted for a major production at the
Abbey Theatre in Dublin, what was eventually published as A Dublin
Bloom only ever received a performed reading at the University of
Pennsylvania.
“It was at 9 0'clock in the morning,” Bolger remembers. “I wanted an
audience of two men and a dog, but could only find two men.”
Even so, Greg Doran's mini production only just about managed to avoid
a skirmish with the Joyce estate.
“They're quite rigid,” Bolger says of the official keepers of the Joyce
flame. “Between the Joyce estate and academics, a whole industry has
grown up around Ulysses, which in many ways has put his work out of a
lot of people's reach. The Abbey were refused to do Joyce's play,
Exile, for instance, and on Bloomsday,” he says of the annual
celebration cum pub crawl of all things Ulysses, “it's said that they
have people going about trying to impose restrictions on readings of
the book, so it's important that the book's given back to the people.”
“The book seems terribly contemporary to me. I can hear the voices of
my city in in. But this industry of academics have created so much
mystique about it that they've taken it away from ordinary people, so
the people who Ulysses is about are afraid of it. James Joyce used to
joke that he was going to write a book that would keep scholars in
work, and so it's proved. It's a difficult book, but it's a very human
book, and the basic story at its heart is easy to get hold of.”
Even so, it was with “an enormous amount of trepidation” that Bolger
took on Ulysses. “I knew I had to be respectful, and I also knew that
no playwright could do justice to Joyce. It's a big, complicated novel
which over eighteen episodes journeys into different styles, but
they're incidental, and I knew there was no way I could do all eighteen
episodes, because they're not all theatrical, so this version is a lot
shorter.
“By the standards of Eugene O'Neill, it's a haiku. As a novelist
myself, I recognise how a novel can derange. It's this huge tree that
can go off in different ways, whereas a play is very linear, and has to
be like a time-bomb to keep the audience guessing and cut things back
to the emotional heart. No woman ever existed in literature like Molly
Bloom, and at the end it's just molly talking, but as a playwright I
have to reimagine that. I think originally when writing it, it was like
trying to write with one hand tied behind my back, having to keep one
eye on the Joyce estate, but going back to it fifteen years later, I
just want to get to the emotional heart of the story. On the end,
whether the play is any good or not is down to me, not Joyce, but
experts won't like it.
Now properly in the public domain, “Ulysses is almost like a lake you
can swim in, and go as far out as you want to go. If you're a deep-sea
diver you're going to go out further, and if you want to be an expert,
you can go in twenty or thirty times and still find something
different, but you don't have to do that. There's a humour and a pathos
and a humanity there that anyone can recognise.”
The Tron production of Bolger's play, presented in association with the
Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and The Everyman, Cork, came about after
Arnold, a long time aficionado of Irish literature and drama, heard
Bolger on a radio programme while visiting family in Ireland. Having
already directed major works by Samuel Beckett, Tom Murphy, Sean
O'Casey and other greats from the Irish pantheon over the last two
decades, Arnold had long been on the look-out for someone to adapt
Ulysses.
“He thought I sounded interesting,” says Bolger, “then he went onto my
website, and he saw that there was already an adaptation, and he got in
touch.”
Although Bolger's original work has rarely been seen in Scotland,
Arnold was running the Arches in Glasgow when 7:84 Scotland presented a
production of Bolger's 1989 debut play, The Lament for Arthur Cleary.
With 7:84 then under the post-John McGrath directorship of Iain Reekie,
Bolger recalls the company's 1992 production well.
“There was an awful lot of kissing, I seem to remember,” he says. “It
was a very good production, but it had the most liberal interpretation
of the stage directions. I remember sitting with a map with all the
places they were touring to marked on it, and each day I'd look at
where they were, while I was at home in front of the fire, which is
where writers should be.”
Having written eleven novels, fourteen plays and eight volumes of
poetry over the last thirty-odd years, the production of Ulysses
arrives onstage at a time when Bolger has only recently returned to
writing following the death of his wife, Bernie, in 2010. a new play,
Tea Chests and Dreams, opened in Dublin in April. Bolger's latest
project, The Fall of Ireland, is about “the catastrophe of the economic
collapse of the last half decade, but it's also about a civil servant
in China.”
With people on his Dublin doorstep affected by the recession in all too
real ways, this too seems to relate to Ulysses in some way.
“The staged reading back then was really great,” he says, “but seeing a
full production will be something else again. That's what happens. As a
prematurely bald middle-aged writer, you find out that life's a bit
like Halley's Comet, and that things tend to come around again.”
Ulysses, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, October 12th-27th, before touring to
Belfast, Dublin and Cork.
www.tron.co.uk
The Herald, October 2nd 2012
ends
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