Stage Struck

Brace yourself for the flood, warns PETER CRAWLEY

WHO SAID this? "If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality." (Clue: It wasn't Charlie Sheen.) The answer is James Joyce, who rebuffed a request to supply a plan of his masterpiece – a Ulysses for Dummies,essentially. "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." Well, that and copyright law.

In Joyce’s case, immortality seems to be safeguarded by making his work tamper-proof. To this end, Stephen Joyce, executor of the estate and Joyce’s only living descendent, has stifled the arguments of professors with something like bitter disdain. (“I am a Joyce, not a Joycean,” he has said, and once suggested that academics “should be exterminated”.)

Theatres have not escaped his censure. In 2004, the Abbey was pressured into cancelling a production of Exiles. More extraordinarily, a performance artist who had simply memorised passages from Finnegan's Wakewas told that he had probably "already infringed" on Joyce's intellectual property.

Such restrictions have created the environment of a pressure cooker and, just two weeks from now, it is scheduled to explode. On January 1st, 2012, Joyce’s work emerges, blinking, into the bright light of the public domain.

Nobody knows precisely how artists will respond to this liberation, but think about the awed and exhilarated populace who storm the palaces of recently fallen dictators for spoils and you get some idea.

No one in Irish theatre has yet had the temerity to confirm plans (could merely thinking ahead counts as an infringement?), but I predict a eureka moment early next year when Exiles, Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manand Dublinerscome up for grabs. The risk will then be not litigation but collision. Will theatre makers bring fresh perspective to Joyce's writing, or will a vastly flooded market devalue his work?

Let's look at two examples, before and after copyright. As You Are Now So Once Were Wewas The Company's 2010 riff on Ulysses, so discreet with its references that it funnelled the enigmas and puzzles of the original into its own odyssey through Dublin. It was a brilliant example of how working within strict limits forces creativity.

With the lawyers on holiday, the first new adaptation we'll see is Gibraltar, a two-person, 90-minute version of Ulyssesby Patrick Fitzgerald, who pounced on the novel when it came out of American copyright last year. (In a similar rush, it opens in The New Theatre on January 1st.) This New York production may honour the literary, philosophical, political and sexual complexity of Joyce's epic, but its advance publicity – "the story of Leopold and Molly Bloom and their families" – doesn't exactly stir the senses.

The Joycean spirit is inquisitive, coruscating and rebellious. But if we are to avoid binge adaptation, Joyceans will also have to be self-regulating.

It’s just you and us now, James. Let’s see how long we can make your immortality last.