The Irish Times reviews Thesis at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght

Thesis Civic Theatre, Tallaght

As stage versions of James Joyce's Ulysses go, Gúna Nua's new play, Thesis, is at once ambitious and constrained.

Ambitious because, unlike previous theatrical versions by Anthony Cronin and Ronnie Walsh, Roger Doyle, Dermot Bolger, Fionnuala Flanagan and Marjorie Barkentin, it is not an adaptation of the whole novel or of an individual chapter. Thesis, written by Gerry Dukes, Paul Meade and David Parnell, is more of a transliteration than an adaptation, converting the events of the novel into a contemporary tale of academic life, rather as William Trevor's short story Two More Gallants transmogrifies Joyce's original story.

Constrained because, in the process, the omnivorous abundance of the novel is inevitably reduced to a more mundane drama of academic and sexual rivalry between a professor and his student. Overall, the play seems caught in two minds between the ambition and the constraint, wanting, on the one hand, to make a neat contemporary drama and, on the other, tempted to remain true to the Joycean spirit of throwing in everything that moves.

Broadly speaking, the play reproduces the structure of the novel. It unfolds over a single day, from the early hours of one morning to the early hours of the next. Its kidney-fancying Bloom is Boyle, a Joyce scholar, played by David Heap as a dry old stick with a hidden seam of sap. Its Molly is his wife Penny (Molly being a version of Homer's Penelope), played by Karen Ardiff as a luxuriant sensualist.

Stephen (engagingly played by Adam Fergus) retains his name, but is transformed into Boyle's star post-doctoral student, who has written a ground-breaking thesis on the importance of Arthur Balfour to Joyce's work.

Other figures from Ulysses (and from The Odyssey) also appear: The Citizen/Cyclops becomes a ranting, racist New York taxi driver; the madam Bella Cohen/ Circe becomes an East European lapdancer.

The one big shift is that Stephen, not Blazes Boylan, becomes Molly's clandestine lover. This is more than just a narrative convenience, however. It ups the intertextual ante to a staggering degree. Since the relationship between Boyle and Stephen is, figuratively, that of father to son, we are now into swampy Oedipal terrain. And the triangle is also configured explicitly in the play as that of Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius. So we're now dealing merely with The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Hamlet and Ulysses - rather a lot of baggage for the slender structure of a campus drama to carry.

Thesis might be better able to carry this imposing load if it had a clear centre of its own, a solid intellectual or emotional core. But, like most works that derive from another text, it doesn't have an organic urgency. Without a single clear aim, and with three writers involved, Thesis has a hit-and-miss feel.

Because there is no precise purpose, we're left with a set of ideas, some great, some terrible, and no organising principle to sort the wheat from the chaff. The result is decidedly odd: passages that display a cleverness bordering on brilliance and passages that seem to exist for no good reason other than a parallel with Ulysses and that therefore become utterly tedious.

At times - and most of them are in the first half - the narrative invention is delightfully sharp and witty. In these passages, Parnell's direction is both punchy and playful, and a well-integrated use of video helps to capture the edgy, dreamlike quality of airports and long-haul flights as Stephen, rather improbably, flies to and from Vermont and Boyle goes to deliver a lecture in Liverpool.

But, especially in the second half, the invention acquires a somewhat desperate quality, as the narrative runs out of steam and the only goal seems to be a completion of Joyce's story. Joyce himself, however, knew that bringing a satisfactory conclusion to a narrative that is purposely banal would require a massive shift of gear: hence Molly's dazzling soliloquy. Nothing like that happens here, and the story simply peters out.

If it seems unfair to complain that any piece of work isn't as good as Ulysses, it also seems dangerous to invite the comparison.

Until Apr 22