Absurd, brilliant and profound, the Abbey Theatre’s production of Dermot Bolger’s adaptation of Joyce’s masterpiece is Ulysses as you never imagined it before: a superbly theatrical homage to Joyce’s chronicle of Dublin life and the greatest novel of all time. With his wife Molly waiting in bed for the nefarious Blazes Boylan, Leopold Bloom traverses Dublin, conversing in pubs, graveyards and brothels, enduring ridicule and prejudice as he steadfastly clings to his principles and subtly slays his dragons while drawing ever closer to his fateful encounter with the young Stephen Dedalus.
As directed by Graham McLaren, Bloom’s odyssey is a pandemonium of live music, puppets and clowning; a production that, in the words of The Arts Review, “throws its arms wide open and bids everyone welcome”. Ulysses is bawdy, hilarious and affecting in celebrating Joyce’s genius for depicting everyday life in all its profundity, with The Sunday Herald remarking that “Dermot Bolger’s beautifully crafted adaptation (carefully and coherently selected from the fiction) has a palpable love for the sensuousness and abundance of Joyce’s language.”
