Ulysses

A bawdy, vibrant and tumultuous adaptation of James Joyce’s classic, by a writer who wants to engage people who may have felt daunted to read Ulysses.

Leopold Bloom’s odyssey is a pandemonium of live music, puppets, dancing, clowning, bowler hats and kazoos. It’s Ulysses as you’ve 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.

Ulysses is bawdy, hilarious and affecting in celebrating Joyce’s genius for depicting everyday life in 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).＂

Born in Finglas, a suburb of Dublin in 1959, the poet, playwright and novelist Dermot Bolger worked as a factory hand, library assistant and small press publisher before settling for the precious life of a full time writer in 1984. He lives in Dublin. His work is often concerned with the articulation of the experiences of working-class characters who, for various reasons, feel alienated from society.

His first three novels, Night Shift, The Woman’s Daughter and The Journey Home form a loose trilogy of standalone books: each set in a different decade in his native working-class suburb of Finglas. He also devised the best-selling collaborative novels, Finbar’s Hotel and Ladies Night at Finbar’s Hotel.

Bolger’s first play, The Lament for Arthur Cleary, received the Samuel Beckett Award for best debut play in Britain, and he has written a number of other plays. His stage adaption of Joyce’s Ulysses, toured in Ireland, Scotland and various cities in China. This text was later revised for a new production staged by the Abbey Theatre during the 2017 Dublin Theatre Festival and was revived in 2018.