A Muted Bloom

By L.M.

ULYSSES IN NIGHTTOWN

Dramatized by MARJORlE BARKENTIN from James Joyce's Ulysses

The night of June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus went on their epic crawl through Dublin's Nighttown whorehouse district--the cuckold Bloom in his extravagant hallucinations of sexual heroism and abasement, the church-dazed intellectual Stephen in a nihilistic trance of guilt. Although James Joyce wrote the Nighttown section of Ulysses in the form of drama, his triple-bottomed language does not translate easily to the stage. It may need the stability of the written page to hold it.

When Marjorie Barkentin's dramatization of Nighttown first opened in New York in 1958, there were critical reservations, for all Zero Mostel's brilliance in the role of Bloom. Now Mostel is back in Nighttown, which opened last week on Broadway. There are still plenty of reservations.

Fordham Freshman. Mostel shambles and capers and preens through Bloom's transformations--a Circe's hog, transvestite, martyr, hero of the people--with an air of dignified amazement. However, this is a muted Mostel, and somehow he is not enough. Whether the problem lies in trying to capture Joyce onstage or in Burgess Meredith's direction, there are long moments of curious lifelessness, a kind of listless anarchy, the stage business often as flyaway as the Joycean allusions.

At least Nighttown has more frank eroticism than before. Molly, played by Fionnuala Flanagan, lies nude in bed as she delivers the famous "Yes" soliloquy with which Ulysses ends. The slatterns, more lissome than Dublin whores ever were, swagger bare-chested about the stage.

Too many important things are lost in this stage translation, which is often as murky as its dark, glowering set.

Somehow the crucial father-son theme connecting Bloom and Stephen never emerges very clearly. Maybe Vatican II is to blame for drawing the poison out of the old Catholic guilts, but Tom Lee Jones' Stephen, in his wild Irish despair, seems no more interesting than a sullen Fordham freshman on a St. Patrick's Day drunk.

L.M.

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