BLOOMSDAY APPEARS

IN FULLER GUISE

NARRATOR NO LONGER

INCLUDED

Bloomsday at the Unity is a different story from Bloomsday as performed not long ago at Oxford. It is still, of course, thc play that Mr. Allan McClelland made out of Ulysses; but the cuts irt James Joyce's original text have been restored now that the performance is being given in a club theatre and a narrator is no longer included in the cast of characters.

Tbe collaboration between Mr. McClelland, who is the producer as well as the adaptor of Bloomnsday, Mr. Sean Kenny, the designer of the set, and the cast is here a happy one. Between them they have set something on the stage t.hat commands respect for the figure behind the scenes: the figure of Joyce. First. what the characters do and say is made to appear simple-not necessarily lucid at all times. but always natural. The various, conversations and monolosues are passed off as being things of everyday. The medical students are, we feel, studying at times when we do not see them taking their ease. The drinkers are habitual drinkers at the pub where we overbear them. And, perhaps more clearly still, Leopold Bloom is a commercial traveller before he is anything else. As Mr. Joe MacColum represents him, he would attract no attention save by a verv slight oddity of appearance such as would make people smile at him behind his back but never to his face. Mr. MacColum's Blum is down-trodden without knowing it. He is accustomed to the treatment handed out to him by the world and is not yet crushed by it.

Mr. Denys Hawthorn (Stephen Daedalus) and Mr. David J. Rowe (Simon Daedalus) make a nicely balanced thine of the sonfather axis. Miss Helen rioldapple draws a flattering and not very consistent portrait of Molly Bloom, but her Molly is credible in her relationship with Bloom himself. The Dubliners in the crowd bend before and sway with the eloquence of Jovce's

dialogue. They respond to it. without' smack-ing their lips over it. Dublin in Mr. Kenny's setting hangs over them like a monument around which children are plaving their serious games. When the coffin of Bloom's old friend is carried from the upper stage to the lower, followed bv the mourners, the procession has a nicely Joycean air of decorous makebelieve.