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Radio 4 Adapts Ulysses
Published on 3rd September 2013
When Kevin Maher mused in his inimitable way that “it takes a certain breed of ignoramus to try to transform Ulysses into a day-long family fun-fest”, part of me was inclined to agree with him – I feared that the BBC’s coverage of Bloomsday, punctuated by a 6-hour dramatisation of Joyce’s most important work, would become a sort of literary hybrid of the Olympic Torch relay and the Jubilee river pageant, with annoyingly smiley slebs spouting inane comments about how “once-in-a-lifetime” it all was. So it was with trepidation, although not quite cynicism, that I tuned in to the first part of the dramatisation, the Telemachiad.
Ulysses has been compared to the Cresta Run racetrack – notoriously difficult, twisting and turning, constantly confronting a reader with the unexpected, there are several points at which racers are thrown off the track, never to return. The first and most lethal of these treacherous hurdles is the first page. However, the listener was eased in gently – the form was dialogue, copy-and-pasted into a script, with occasional sentences of fairly naturalistic narration. So far, then, so tasteful, and the instantly magnetic Andrew Scott as Stephen Dedalus helped to lubricate the less comprehensible parts – the listener understood that his convoluted assertions (“the cracked mirror of a servant – a symbol of Irish art”) were an attribute of his literary-minded, slightly pretentious character, rather than an attribute of Joyce’s style. Not having to look down at 800 pages of text ahead of you also made the experience a little less daunting than reading the book. Despite my initial dubiousness, “Week in Westminster” at eleven was an unwelcome interruption. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that much of what I had experienced in reading Ulysses was being left out – Robin Brooks, who had adapted the novel for the radio, had said that “Once you lay it out as a script rather than a piece of prose, it really becomes much clearer”. True, but is that really the point? The main character in Ulysses is the form – the make or break of this adaptation would be its success in conveying what was on the page. So far, much of that had been ironed out in the adaptation process.
The acting, though, remained excellent, as the narrative focus shifted to Leopold Bloom, the novel’s protagonist. Henry Goodman’s Bloom was very different to the man I had imagined – older, wearier – but he had managed to make an iconic character, after whom “Bloomsday” is named, his own. As the day wore on, it was Goodman and Scott’s obvious relish of the irreverent, witty, naughty, often sexy language that took the listener by the hand, pulling them through the more thorny and difficult passages.
It was in the evening, though, that the adaptation came to life – Bloom’s masturbatory ecstasies over Gerty MacDowell perfectly balanced Mills & Boon parody, pure filth, and psychological subtlety. This led into the notorious maternity hospital scene - 40 literary styles, from Latinate prose, through Anglo-Saxon alliteration, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Defoe, Sterne, Walpole, Gibbon, Dickens, and Carlyle, supposedly echo the 40-week gestation period, with Ulysses conjectured as the resultant “baby”. The chapter was dealt with in a way that was unflashy, with a narrator calling out each style as it came, followed by a short section in that style. It worked beautifully, and most importantly it was great fun to listen to – it would have been easy to consign the chapter to incomprehensibility, capitulating to the ever-tempting “Oh, you’ve just got to let it wash over you”, but Brooks took it on, revelling in the kinaesthetic pleasure and pure fun of the linguistic playground. The hallucinatory foray into Dublin’s red light district in the 15th episode took the adaptation up another notch, intense beauty and overpowering dirt clashing, building to the catharsis of the penultimate scene, one of two (along with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy) that were read in their entirety. The chapter is written in the style of a Christian catechism, with comfortingly formulaic questions and answers. The soft rhythm and lilting Irish accents were hypnotic, a moment of calm after the kaleidoscopic chaos of the previous scenes, that cleansed the palate for the grand finale: Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Niamh Cusack’s rendering of the scene abandoned the 8-sentence structure, chopping up the speech. Although this slightly undermined the idea of an uncontrolled stream of consciousness, it made the coarse, earthy speech intensely human, and deeply moving. It was an exemplification of what he whole piece had tried to do - despite the lightness of touch in attempting to convey the form, the adaptation focused on what it could achieve: the cheeky, impish, iconoclastic fun of the text, and its uncompromising scrutiny of the human mind. Did it succeed? Yes, I said yes.
