Ulysses

'I am a fool perhaps. Boylan gets the plums and I the plum stones. My youth. Never again. Gibraltar. Evenings like this looking out over the sea, she told me, but clear, no clouds. Said she always thought she'd marry a lord or a gentleman with a private yacht. Why me?' Read more …

While his wife Molly waits in bed for the infamous Blazes Boylan, Leopold Bloom is in Dublin conversing in pubs, graveyards, press rooms, brothels... and then home.

Adapted for stage by celebrated author and Dublin chronicler Dermot Bolger, Ulysses is bawdy, hilarious and affecting, and celebrates Joyce's genius for depicting life in all its profundity.

The critical consensus

While the production never convinces that this script has successfully managed to do more than transfer the text into a theatrical format, the cast’s excellence are honed by Arnold’s solid direction to animate the classic with a bawdy vitality.

Gareth K Vile, The Stage, 17/10/2012

This is a piece of theatre to remember, as rich and glorious as an old scratched ruby, lying at the bottom of some infinitely cluttered drawer.

(*) Joyce McMillan, 18/10/2012

You leave the auditorium with a buoyant sense of having been present at a major event. Yet Arnold, Bolger and the ensemble's real achievement lies in having captured the rich humanity and intimate detail of Joyce's novel rather than its epic scale or mighty reputation.

(*) Allan Radcliffe, The List, 18/10/2012

This entertaining transposition confines the vertigo-inducing allusiveness of Joyce's text within a cliche-skirting narrative.

Clare Brennan, The Observer, 21/10/2012