Joyce's Ulisses on the Polish stage

Once again, Miachal Borczuch is tackling a multithreaded huge novel, the staging of which seems a mighty challenge. He reaches for Joyce's novel as he did in My Struggle, staged at TR Warsaw, and explores family relations. Premiere on 14 February at the Słowacki Theatre in Krakow.

It is the story of how one day the paths of the main protagonists - Leopold and Molly and Stephen, i.e. a middle-aged couple in crisis, and a lost student, poet and son of friends - meet, cross and finally diverge. The relationship between the generations of parents and children is multidimensional in the novel. Each character carries the burden of it. Leopold and Molly have lost a son - the sense of this loss is constantly recurring. Leopold is marked by grief after the suicide death of his father, as is Stephan after the death of his mother. The traumatic death of a child or parent becomes an obsessive motif.

However, the play goes beyond the matrix of the family drama. In Joyce's imaginative and poetic leaps between narrative techniques, the conflict depicted in a small, realistic space is scaled to a cosmic, total perspective. The parallax, shifting and stemmed in the novel, locates the relationships between the protagonists in a concrete social, political reality, described in terms of class, gender, urbanity, by specialised knowledge, etc.; it projects the fate of the protagonists into the human past, mythical, primordial and savage.