Ulysses takes to the Dublin stage as copyright lifted
Tuesday December 20 2011
A NEW stage adaptation of James Joyce's Ulysses will open in Dublin as copyright restrictions finally come to an end.
The play will premiere on New Year's Day, which marks the date of the long-anticipated end of European copyright controls on the publication and performance of Joyce's literary works.
To celebrate this Joycean milestone, The New Theatre, Temple Bar, is staging Patrick Fitzgerald's Gibraltar: An adaptation Of James Joyce's Ulysses, for the first fortnight of 2012.
Joyce's complex, brilliant and bawdy novel about a day in the life of a number of characters in Dublin was first published in 1922.
Gibraltar was first performed at the Bowery Electric theatre in New York last year October.
Transposing
The most recent performance was at the Plays and Players' Theatre in Philadelphia on Bloomsday this year, in association with the Rosenbach Museum where the original Ulysses manuscript is housed.
Director Patrick Fitzgerald, who is also an actor and writer, explained: "It struck me, as an actor, that an understanding of the book could be helped by transposing it into play form." After experimenting for several years on a play called Blooms' Day, Fitzgerald changed direction and started working with his friend, the actress Cara Seymour, on Gibraltar.
Following several readings and workshops, Terry Kinney, co-founder of the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and an acclaimed Broadway director, joined as consultant director.
Kinney's television credits include Oz and The Mentalist, and his film credits include Sleepers, The Firm, and Save The Last Dance.
aokeeffe@herald.ie
- Alan O'Keeffe
