There is a moment when everyone who picks up James Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses realises it is going to be a much harder read than they first thought.
That moment is the third chapter, when Joyce’s alter-ego Stephen Dedalus stands looking across the sea and lets his mind wander – for what feels like an incomprehensible eternity.
That didn’t stop the book being named as one of the country’s most popular novels, coming in at number 78 in the BBC’s 2003 Big Read poll.
“People get scared about that whole stream of consciousness stuff but it’s a great way of showing what’s going on in his head,” says Katie O’Kelly, the performer behind 22 different characters in Joyced!
“At the time it must have been amazing to read. It was like nothing anybody had ever done before. You can’t contain Joyce or put him into a genre – Ulysses is so wide-ranging with the amount of different forms of writing in the book.”
It still has a strong hold in Dublin, which hosts the annual Bloomsday on June 16 every year – the day in 1904 when the epic novel was set.
And it was Bloomsday that led to the creation of the one-man play by O’Kelly’s father Donal to mark the 100th anniversary in 2004.
“Myfather wrote it for the centenary but it was a much longer show called Jimmy Joyced,” says O’Kelly. “He performed it in Dublin’s Bewley’s Café Theatre, in Grafton Street.
“This showis a little bit more edited down.”
His daughter revived the play after being approached by someone in the Oslo-based Irish Norwegian society, who wanted a one-person performance piece about Joyce for Bloomsday 2011.
“My father said I should do it,” says O’Kelly. “I’m a girl playing Joyce but if he could play Nora [Joyce’s wife], then I thought I should give it a go.”
The play encompasses from February to October 1904 – a period that was the making of Joyce, when he met many of the people who would inspire the characters populating Ulysses, as well as the love of his life, Nora, the woman he met on June 16, 1904. The pair would later elope to Europe at the end of that year.
“He interweaved the people he met into the fabric of his work,” says O’Kelly. “In 1904, he was a 22-year-old lad out in Dublin going mad with his friends and falling in love for the first time.”
The express purpose of the play is to make people want to read Joyce’s work.
“It’s not for Joycean scholars,” says O’Kelly. “I think people’s perceptions of Joyce is that he’s a really difficult hard slog to read because Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are such big texts.
“Dubliners is accessible for everybody, with nice short stories which are so well-written.
“Sometimes he can come across as being really difficult, but some of his stuff is hilarious. We try to show the real Joyce.”
One of the biggest challenges for O’Kelly has been recreating 22 characters on her own, assisted only by a trunk, a chair, a straw boater and a set of black wings.
“It was tricky to learn the text. I found the easiest way was to learn it as the characters,” says O’Kelly. “My director is very good at working out where the characters are. Once you have it clear where they are, and the different heights they are at, it adds a huge dimension to the audience.
“People say it must be scary being on stage on your own but I feel like the characters are all there with me. I hope that doesn’t make me sound crazy!”
Hendrick’s Library Of Delightfully Peculiar Writings, Jubilee Square, Brighton, Thursday, May 24, to Sunday, May 27
Starts 8.45pm, tickets £9. Call 01273 017272
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