Towers of cardboard boxes, a bare stage and four actors in search of a script: this show has the abstraction of a dance piece or an art installation, as bodies and boxes move in patterns that may or may not be random. Taking their cue from Joyce's Ulysses, which provides them with the title of the piece, the four performers recall the minutiae of a single day, from the comic banality of morning rituals to their arrival at the theatre to start the show we are watching. As they attempt to reconstruct their journey through Dublin, they forget the details and are fed cues by the others, each an unreliable narrator of their own life, but very certain about everyone else's.
Using their own names and creating the impression of making everything up as they go along, these actors meet the risk of extreme self-consciousness head on. This is, in fact, their subject: the unrepeatable moment that is the present, and the impossibility of experiencing it from anyone's perspective but one's own.
There are moments when it threatens to become too self-referential, with the text thinly stretched over some in-jokes, but director José Miguel Jiménez ensures the philosophical themes are anchored in movement sequences, choreographed in a series of repetitions and interruptions. The boxes are pushed around in stacks to create streets, furniture, buildings; at times they evoke a cardboard city of the homeless.
Having made their mark at the Dublin fringe festival, this young company (The Company) are a bit constrained on the more formal Peacock stage. But it's clear they have the confidence to take something deceptively simple and push it to its limits, transforming an empty box into a Rubik's Cube.
