Joyced!

"Rescue Jimmy Joyce," our narrator's father tells him. "He is in the labyrinth; the academics have him." There's one thing father and daughter team Donal and Katie O'Kelly don't achieve in this frenetic whistle-stop tour of Dublin in 1904, and that's to rip Joyce from the grasp of academia. That's no bad thing: this is a learned and thoughtful production, borne clearly from rigorous study of the language, devices and context of Joyce's Ulysses. What it does achieve with utter assuredness is to bring those real-life characters who informed Joyce's epic novel energetically to life. In doing so, we're reminded that, behind the Irishman's mastery of language and form lies a human drama of small lives amid the grimy metropolis of Dublin.

While the insight into the real people who became, say, Leopold Bloom or Buck Mulligan, certainly provides a fascinating view through a biographical lens, the more interesting artistic aspect of Donal O'Kelly's script is its beautifully constructed homage to the Joycean stylistic innovations. From the free-indirect style of young James at home with his family (faces don't just appear in candlelight, they are "Rembrandted") to piling on of puns ad extremis, opening up imaginative doors with each variation, what could be frigid imitation instead crackles with invention. Daughter Katie's one-person performance of that script is a masterclass in careful characterisation of this large and motley cast of Dubliners. Special mention must go to her depiction of the young aesthete himself – a pitch-perfect model of haughty arrogance and adolescent mardiness.