The Curse of a Title: bloominauschwitz (or, What's Leopold Bloom Got To Do With It?)

Titles of plays both reveal and conceal, often in unequal measures. bloominauschwitz is a drama by Richard Fredman, to be produced by the Menagerie Theatre Company of Cambridge at the upcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018. You have to say its name out loud, in a public place, to get its full impact. It immediately reveals a landscape of concerns, while concealing slapstick comedy, audience interaction, and a modern odyssey about identity, migration, fear of "others," and our tragic attempts to escape from history.

bloominauschwitz is provocative for an obvious reason: it derives part of its name from the death camp in which over one million people, mainly European Jews, were systematically murdered over a five-year period. Within a British context, the title jars even more and needs parsing to help non-English speakers understand the nuances. In its spelling, it is a piece of Joyce-inspired, uncapitalized wordplay. The playful, almost anachronistic, "bloomin" is juxtaposed with the ugly, singularly specific, "Auschwitz." It has at least four interpretations, the first three of which are easily understood.

Bloom (Leopold Bloom) in Auschwitzbloom (a flower blooming) in Auschwitzblooming (Auschwitz in bloom) Auschwitzbloomin' Auschwitz which many non-United Kingdom natives may not understand.

"Bloomin'" is an old-fashioned word, rarely used today, to express anger or frustration: "It's a bloomin' disgrace!" or "I'm not going to bloomin' well clean up after him." It might also be spelled "blimmin'" and pronounced as such. "Bloomin'" can also be used to dismiss something/someone, as though the speaker has simply had enough of that subject/person. The title dares us to address that sensibility with regard to Auschwitz. Ultimately, the play reveals itself to be a piece that breathes new life into what the horrors of Auschwitz might mean for us today.

In short, bloominauschwitz is a play for one actor, with arguably Joyce's most famous character, Leopold Bloom, at its center. The play begins simultaneously in the present day and on the morning of 16 June 1904, the date of the novel, in Bloom's outside toilet in Dublin. He escapes from the novel to reclaim his identity and history, leading him—as the son of a Hungarian Jew—to Auschwitz, where he discovers what this identity means in a fuller sense. It culminates with Bloom being propelled forward to the present day and a reckoning with his past.

Fredman was inspired to write the play as a way of exploring how we construct our personal, cultural, and historical identities. Brought up in the Jewish faith, he was particularly curious about the place of the Nazi Holocaust in the construction of modern Jewish identity. Having read Ulysses and visited the Auschwitz concentration camp, Fredman saw Bloom's uncertain history as a dramatic conduit to pursue his curiosity. Bloom is not matrilineally Jewish. His father was a Jewish immigrant to Ireland from Hungary who then converted to Christianity. Despite being born in Ireland, Bloom possesses remnants of his father's past. He is reincarnated in the play as a man in search of an identity, who claims his Jewish heritage as a way of giving himself a past and therefore the possibility of a future.

The Play

The play begins with Bloom—inside the novel, sitting on his outside toilet—being visited by his future self, from the present day. For the purposes of clarity, Bloom 1 is the character on the toilet inside the novel, and Bloom 2 is the modern-day version of Bloom, aware of his own fame as a literary character. This comic meeting of the two characters (one of whom is trying to protect his privacy and dignity in an outside toilet), played by the single actor, initiates the essential relationship of the play: a man divided between the self that knows nothing except what is written for him and the self that both knows history and his place within it.

Bloom 2 urges Bloom 1 to come with him to the future, the audience's present day. Bloom 1, though, once he has...