Michał Borczuch

We have extracted a ‘simple story’ from this monumental book. It is the story of how one day the paths of its two central protagonists, Leopold and Molly – a middle-aged couple in crisis – meet, cross and finally diverge with Stephen's – a lost student, poet and a son of their friends. In the novel, the relationship between the generations of parents and children is multidimensional. Each character carries its burden. Leopold and Molly have lost a son – the sense of this loss constantly resurfaces. Leopold is marked by his grief after the suicide death of his father, as is Stephen after the death of his mother. The traumatic death of a child or parent becomes an obsessive motif.

However, the play goes beyond the matrix of family drama. In Joyce's imagination and poetics, shifting between narrative techniques, the conflict depicted in a small, realistic space is re-scaled to a cosmic, total perspective. The parallax, shifting and thematised in the novel, locates the relationships between the protagonists in a concrete social, political reality, described in terms of class, gender, urbanism, expertise, etc.; it projects the fate of the protagonists into the human past, mythical, primordial and savage.