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Joyce’s Homeric allusion to the one-eyed Cyclops and his monstrous cave are key motifs in this production.  Joyce sets the scene in Barney Kiernan’s pub, which was a real tavern at 8-10 Little Britain St, north of the Liffey, and not far from the Dublin market, the Four Courts, and St. Michan’s Church. It was a ‘themed’ pub: Barney Kiernan collected souvenirs of crime and punishment and refreshed his exhibits continually. So it is an appropriate setting for talk of martyrs and victims, and for prurient drinkers of all kinds, and, in a mock heroic gesture to Homer, for missiles and violence.

The chapter is heavily freighted with Irish history and offers an anti-colonial spin on Ireland’s past.  The Citizen is no slouch as an historian: he knows the heroes and their exploits but Joyce is not above co-opting a few more celebrities to his cause; the Citizen cites chapter and verse on uprisings and their vicissitudes, and on colonial abuses in the far-flung parts of European empires like the Belgian Congo. Indeed, the British Consul and Irish patriot, Roger Casement’s writings on human rights abuses in the Congo rubber trade was news in 1904, the date on which Ulysses is set. Joyce’s mentioning Casement positively in 1922 (the novel’s publication date) was counter-cultural, as he’d been executed for his part in conspiring with the Germans at the time of the Easter Rising, traduced as a homosexual, and, despite his nationalist credentials, was not yet enrolled as one of the nationalist heroes.

Most impressively, the Citizen is full-bottle on the economic history of Ireland and how British protectionism had destroyed a raft of Irish industries. Where Joyce sits in all this, to what extent the Citizen’s actions condemn him, and how far Joyce agreed with his jingoism, and his history, is a matter for intense debate among the scholars.

Translating this chapter into theatre has been a huge challenge. The prose scintillates with upwards of 30 parodies in various styles, many of them archaic Irish styles, which interrupt the narrative in the bar. Some of the finest poetry of the chapter is to be found in them, and they too are learned, rich in both tribute and satire. One cannot engage in parody or pastiche without loving what one imitates. The baroque excursions with which Joyce litters the chapter sometimes comment on the action in the bar, but sometimes not. Sometimes they engage in the politics of mock-heroic, inflating and deflating in turns. The Bloomsday scripters have had to foreshorten most of these, but hope you will enjoy the virtuosity of the fragments that survived.

As always, however dispiriting the scene in the bar is, and it is a crucifixion which Bloom suffers at the hands of anti-semites, Joyce is adept at keeping our hearts up. The production shows the long-suffering Bloom at is morally heroic best, satirises his nasty traducers, and brings to the fore those extravagant parodies, that do so much to breathe fresh life into old traditions.