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Ireland’s most notoriously complex book adapted for kids? Yes, James Joyce’s famous experimental novel Ulysses is cleverly retold here in 45 minutes by Galway theatre company Branar. Storyteller Helen Gregg does an exquisite job in her tweed trousers and beret,

The List

It sounds like a joke. Take a famously impenetrable classic of world literature, a stream-of-consciousness Dublin odyssey stretching to 250,000 words, and turn it into a show for the over-eights. But Helen Gregg is for real and her adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses is a joy.

Introducing a book that few of the adults in the audience will have read, she strips it down to its narrative framework, judiciously editing for family viewing, and turns it into 45 minutes of day-in-the-life storytelling.

Leafing through enormous pop-up books – three of them, just like the sections of the original – she traces the comings and goings of a cut-out Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, flanked by a city’s worth of quirky characters, from funeral to office to pub. In Marc Mac Lochlainn’s production for Galway company Branar, it is performed with wit and lucidity, not to mention musical interludes. Gregg is a brilliant interpreter and makes an imposing novel sound like a fun thing to tackle at home.

The Guardian