Several patrons have sent me a link to an article by Dermot Bolger (the Irish playwright) which appeared in the Irish Times last weekend. I responded warmly to the sinking feeling, the doubts and misgivings, that he reports about whether it's even possible to translate Ulysses into theatrical events.
Having done it for 20 years, with a new script almost every year, I don't think a single year has gone by without experiencing such doubts, quite radical doubts, sometimes until very late in the process. I've seen directors throw their hands in the air and have sleepless nights wondering how it could possibly work as a staged phenomenon.
Molly - too long, fine as fiction, but rather tedious as a bedsteadfast monologue - so why not multiple Mollys? Cyclops: too many disjunctions between the barflies and their brawls (the nasty strand of the chapter) and the interpellations (with their verbal exuberance), and can the merely verbal hold an audience's attention? Perhaps the easiest chapter was Circe, but what about its metamorphosing phantasms, the mercurial, unprepared-for shifts in the narrative impulse, and the frankly apocalyptic cinematic elements (e.g., Dublin's burning!) and it's immensely quiet, non-verbal ending. Delicious. The more naturalistic chapters perhaps don't have the right shape for theatre? Would I attempt the whole work? You could, but you'd sacrifice a lot of the linguistic richness of the experimental chapters, and you'd have to have to find a compromise route through the maze of characters. It's challenging, alright.
I'm interested in the solution Bolger found: to put Molly at the centre and to work through her memories, and I can see how this would work well for getting Bloom centre-stage, but it must short-change Stephen. I really hope we get to see this production.
Maybe it's time to record some of the processes by which scripts come to being?
Having done it for 20 years, with a new script almost every year, I don't think a single year has gone by without experiencing such doubts, quite radical doubts, sometimes until very late in the process. I've seen directors throw their hands in the air and have sleepless nights wondering how it could possibly work as a staged phenomenon.
Molly - too long, fine as fiction, but rather tedious as a bedsteadfast monologue - so why not multiple Mollys? Cyclops: too many disjunctions between the barflies and their brawls (the nasty strand of the chapter) and the interpellations (with their verbal exuberance), and can the merely verbal hold an audience's attention? Perhaps the easiest chapter was Circe, but what about its metamorphosing phantasms, the mercurial, unprepared-for shifts in the narrative impulse, and the frankly apocalyptic cinematic elements (e.g., Dublin's burning!) and it's immensely quiet, non-verbal ending. Delicious. The more naturalistic chapters perhaps don't have the right shape for theatre? Would I attempt the whole work? You could, but you'd sacrifice a lot of the linguistic richness of the experimental chapters, and you'd have to have to find a compromise route through the maze of characters. It's challenging, alright.
I'm interested in the solution Bolger found: to put Molly at the centre and to work through her memories, and I can see how this would work well for getting Bloom centre-stage, but it must short-change Stephen. I really hope we get to see this production.
Maybe it's time to record some of the processes by which scripts come to being?
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