Theatre review: CoisCéim step out with Calypso from Ulysses
Go To Blazes, by CoisCéim: Justine Cooper, Jonathan Mitchell and Rosie Stebbing. Picture: Ste Murray
★★★★☆
How is Ulysses like Star Wars? It really starts at Episode 4. Don’t mind your “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan”, the real meat of the book, quite literally, comes with the Calypso episode, when we meet Mr Leopold Bloom, a man who eats “with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls".
It is this chapter that director David Bolger takes up as CoisCéim Dance Theatre’s contribution to the Ulysses 2.2 project, a year-long series of responses to Joyce’s book, produced by Anu, Landmark, and MoLi, the museum of literature.
In contrast to Stephen Dedalus’s abstract, highfalutin reveries, as he walks "into eternity” along Sandymount Strand, in Calypso we get the sensual noticer Bloom, whose alternative way of seeing the world Joyce introduces the reader to in a chapter full of sound (“Mkgnao”, says the cat), taste (a mutton kidney’s “fine tang” of urine), sex (Molly setting the bed springs jingling, her “large soft bubs, sloping within her night dress”), and other bodily functions.
It’s a highly olfactory episode too, of course, and here’s where we begin in Bolger’s piece, as Justine Cooper gives us a little lecture on how smell works. We follow Bloom’s nose on his morning route to the butcher’s: the “flabby gush of porter” at the corner pub; a whiff of “ginger and biscuitmush”. Each time, Cooper sprays the scent for us to sample. Yes, even that tang of urine; and worse, when she dons rubber gloves and lifts the lid on a suspicious jar after recounting Bloom’s visit to the outhouse. Oof!
Cooper describes the unique molecular structures of scent: top notes, bottom notes, and, going over to an upright piano, literal notes as she plays one for each we sniff. In a lovely moment, it becomes clear she’s composed before us the opening bars of La Ci Darem. The Don Giovanni aria echoes through Ulysses, a symbol of Blazes Boylan, the seducer, the interloper in the marriage bed; but also, foreshadowing in its lyrics (“dirai di si”) Molly’s final, Bloom-directed “yes”. With such a deft, resounding, multilayered allusion, Joyce gets at the richness of ordinary life, something beyond the sensory, even as he represents that so intensely.
It’s a strand Bolger picks up on, as we don our virtual-reality headsets, with talk of “metempsychosis” in our ears, to watch an immersive dance to David Clohessy’s searing music that wrenchingly evokes the Blooms’ sundering and reunion, their past and uncertain future.
The Calypso episode in Ulysses is often recommended as an entryway to the novel, given its clear narrative style. But that apparent simplicity nonetheless conveys all the complexity of life as it’s lived, in mind and body. As Bolger takes us from our immediate senses to the metaverse, he creates a fitting, eloquent, and worthy response.
- Until November 20. See coisceim.com
