James Joyce as you've never heard him before

Ahead of a ground-breaking Radio 4 adaptation, Tom Payne explains why James Joyce's great masterwork Ulysses is perfectly suited to radio.

Joyce's Dublin, as depicted in Ulysses Photo: Hulton Archive

By Tom Payne - The Telegraph 14 Jun 2012

In 1931, James Joyce and his friends huddled around a radio in Paris, ready to hear Harold Nicolson praise him on the BBC. All they heard was Nicolson announcing that he wasn’t allowed to give his talk. A fortnight later, Lord Reith did let the talk about Joyce go ahead, just so long as Nicolson didn’t mention Ulysses, which had been banned by the Home Office for obscenity. In the event, the talk included extensive quotations from the novel – just no mention of the title.

This Saturday, as if to atone for this moral censure, the BBC celebrates Ulysses in all its glory. It is Bloomsday, after all – June 16, on which the action of Ulysses (set in 1904) takes place. Radio 4 is taking listeners on a five-and-a-half hour journey around Dublin with the novel’s unlikely hero, Leopold Bloom, voyeur and visionary, and with the poet he befriends, Stephen Dedalus. This will reflect the structure of the novel, which moves from early morning to just before dawn on the following day: the broadcasts will dip in and out of the story in something like real time.

As Jeremy Howe, the station’s head of drama, explains, “It’s lucky it’s a Saturday, when Radio 4 can loosen its corsets a bit. The book does have its ruderies, but Gwyneth Williams [the controller of Radio 4] said that it was as if Joyce had written the book to fit the challenges of scheduling it.” The really rude part, in which Molly Bloom, played by Niamh Cusack, sits on a chamber pot and reflects on her erotic life, will fall shortly before midnight.

No such worries for the morning broadcasts, when the characters of the novel will be eating their breakfasts, including Leopold Bloom’s dish of “thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards”, just as you’re eating cornflakes. Although sensitive listeners should be warned that there’s to be an alarmingly early use of the word “scrotum”, this is less likely to scare off modern audiences than the book’s daunting reputation as experimental and wilfully difficult. For this reason, Mark Lawson is on hand, live from Dublin, where the Irish President, Michael D Higgins, will host a Bloomsday breakfast.
Full story at The Telegraph