There I was, in the basement of a pub on Bloomsday, about to behold an 18-part odyssey into, or around, James Joyce’s Ulysses. The show ran on Maltese time, so it started a little late. I decided to sip at some whiskey to prime my palate in the meantime (thinking whiskey, rather than whisky, would be the more fitting option given the occasion).

While waiting for Ulysses: A Portrait of the Artist on Fire to begin, I took a moment to gather my assumptions. I assumed the play would include some element of stream of consciousness and would somehow involve the mundane, given that Ulysses is a novel on ordinary lives told in 2,000-word sentences.

Considering the piece was co-written and directed by Vikesh Godhwani, I assumed it would be no ordinary rendition. Given the strange setting, I assumed the play would turn out rather odd… I suppose my assumptions were correct in isolation, but I could not have foreseen how the show would transpire.

Emma Johnson

In effect, Ulysses: A Portrait of the Artist on Fire is a play about failure. The protagonist and co-writer Emma Johnson plays what seems to be some version of themselves – the artist who catches fire. It takes us a moment to realise the first act is under way, caught off guard amid the remains of an ever-broken fourth wall.

After planting many seeds in the first act, acclimatising us to the metatheatrical experience to come, the forthcoming acts see Emma attempting to write the play we are witnessing.

Squirming at a blank Word document, negotiating with time and space for optimal writing conditions and combatting imposter syndrome, the scene was increasingly relatable to at least some of us present, echoing an everyday experience of the disillusioned, university-educated (semi)professional.

Indeed, the play featured not only Emma and Vikesh, but also the University of Malta English department. The occasional reference to the dons seated in the audience – whether live or on-screen during vox-pop titbits peppering the performance – extended the artist’s laments to those of the present and former students in our midst. This felt at once self-indulgent and cathartic.

As the protagonist scrambled around in uncreative torment, along came the spectre Sabotina – the self-sabotaging ghoul who prods at the “corpses of our own potential”, eating away at the artist’s eyes, heart and mind (literally, in this case, while embodied by Emma who gulped down the carrion onstage).

A strange yet fitting tribute to the lives of artists

As one would expect from a stream of consciousness, nothing is dwelt upon at length, instead morphing to the next logical/strange step before morphing again. We go from breakfast to TikTok to a musical interlude by lecturer and soprano Maria Frendo, with omens of death and banana bread in between. The fragments entwine to make something at once coherent and not – were the piece to make too much sense, then we wouldn’t be as much aware of the spirit of failure lurking throughout.

At times, the show does fall mildly into failure. Seating in the basement determined how much of the show one could see with ease; at one point the room filled with smoke as we each held up a sparkler; at another, as some in the audience were made to read out some ascribed thoughts, not everyone read them out well enough for the jokes to land. Everything was excused a priori – this is a show about failure, after all.

Then along came COVID-19 – a spectre more fearsome than Sabotina – who disrupted and reformulated the mundane and confronted the artist with an even greater onslaught of failure. As reminders of artists’ ‘low business IQ’ appeared onscreen, we were given a glimpse of the existential torment these must have faced in the past two years.

Performed as part of the Victoria International Arts Festival 2022, dreamt up, as we came to see in the final act, as a response to COVID upheaval and the jubilee of Joyce’s day-long epic, Ulysses: A Portrait of the Artist on Fire is a strange yet fitting tribute to the lives of artists and a good workaround to the paralysing problem of failure.