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The New Theatre, Dublin

Now that we can adapt Joyce for the stage, the question is whether we should. Patrick Fitzgerald's swift theatrical rendering of the highlights of Ulysses, which debuted in New York in 2010 shortly after the book came out of American copyright and opened in Dublin on the day its European copyright expired, certainly seems to be in a hurry to bring it to an audience.

With just two performers – the lean and energetic Fitzgerald and the translucent Cara Seymour – A Rose upon the Rood’s production travels light, using multiple role play, minimal set and a pared-back narrative to make Ulysses stageable. It is so occupied with what a theatrical adaptation must take away from the novel, in fact, that it never quite makes a case for what it adds.

“How are they going to know that one minute I’m your Muse, the next I’m Molly, the next I’m your dead father’s Hungarian ghost, next I’m the cat?” Seymour asks in a short preamble. Those are good questions for a director (along with, “Why does Bloom speak with a Cork accent and Molly with an English one?”) if a director could be found. But while Steppenwolf’s Terry Kinney is credited as a “Consultant”, there’s a sense that the production is guided by a higher power: in Joyce they trust.

Beginning with Bloom at breakfast – “Mr Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls” – Fitzgerald’s adaptation trims out Stephen Dedalus almost entirely, focusing instead on Bloom’s Dublin odyssey and Molly’s languorous sensuality, savouring Joyce’s words (with relish) and occasional sound effects, but making the possibilities of the theatre seem subordinate.

Literary purists will think that a necessary sacrifice, but with Bloom’s meditation on “the transmigration of souls”, there seems to be more licence (if that was still necessary) for theatrical devices commensurate with Joyce’s experimentation; to treat characters as a shared consciousness, perhaps, from which the performers could draw equally. Instead, Muses and cats notwithstanding, the roles are more conventionally rigid.

Seymour plays Bloom briefly and inconsequentially during the Cyclops episode but is more snug within Molly’s elegantly and accessibly realised stream of consciousness. Fitzgerald lingers by her bedside to punctuate her erotic digression with a recitation of the beatitudes, which seems an odd juxtaposition – is Molly experiencing a religious rapture? – but it’s a rare counterbalance to just how corporeal Ulysses seems onstage. Without a reader’s complicity in Joyce’s parodies and fillips, Bloom’s bowel movements and onanistic fantasies or Molly’s desires and infidelities seem bluntly amusing and sometimes banal: words made flesh.

Any adaptation of Ulysseswill be necessarily reductive, but a better approach would be transformative. They may open the door to Joycean adaptation, but for all the command and reverence of Fitzgerald and Seymour's performance, its effect is to send you back to the book. That, one suspects, is how Joyce would have liked it.

Until Jan 15