Introduction: Screening Modern Irish Fiction and Drama

Abstract

The drama and fiction of the period of the Irish Renaissance, that great flowering of Irish literature and culture that runs from roughly 1890 to 1940, has proven curiously resistant to adaptation to film. Joyce’s great fictions seem to have baffled film treatment: Joseph Strick’s film of Ulysses (1967) did not even attempt to match Joyce’s philosophical and stylistic technique, but instead settled into a realistic rendering of the main story of the book, resulting in a caricature of the literary work that did not achieve the new perspective that a great adaptation seeks; Strick’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977) seemed somewhat more successful, largely because that novel has closer affinities to realism and hence Strick’s straightforward conveying of the story is less jarring than with his Ulysses. (The sublime performance of Sir John Gielgud as the priest who delivers the hell-fire sermon is also a redeeming feature.) Before the much more innovative and interesting 2003 Sean Walsh film Bloom, the only engaging film of a Joyce work remained John Huston’s The Dead (1987)—a fascinating and subtle effort to use film to re-envision a great work of modernist literature.