Molly Bloom's soliloquy from "Ulysses" was presented last week as part of a programme of theatre in the Malta International Arts Festival.

The task of punctuating, adapting, interpreting and memorising the larger part of the sixty-odd pages of print which make up the monologue is indeed a heavy one.

Patricia Leventon succeeds in her one hour speech, in capturing the essence of Molly Bloom's being and communicating it to the audience. Molly's softness is evident from the start. The audience's attention is directed straight away, not to the logic of her thought processes but to the basic theme, which is the sensual element in a woman's life. The recollections of her conquests, attractions, sensations and misgivings are thus presented as variations on that theme.

Ms. Leventon holds the attention of the audience throughout the performance. Her success rests in her identification with Molly Bloom; she achieves a unity with her role, not because she is Irish, but because she understands Joyce and his vision of the thoughts and desires of a woman.

James Joyce's "Ulysses" is perhaps the most famous of all modern novels, and no part of it is more famous than the last chapter - Molly Bloom's long soliloquy. A cornucopia of the remembered sight, touch, taste, smell suffering, joy, awareness, blindness, hope and despair.

All this Patricia Leventon herself a Dubliner, brings to glowing life in the douce and unlikely environment of Randolf Crescent, Edinburgh. Well not quite all. The full soliloquy would run for about two hours. This adaptation has been carefully and lovingly edited to half that length.

This is not a reading of Joyce, and not so much a performance as a re-enactment by a talented actress in which every gesture every inflection seems inevitably appropriate. For an hour Edinburgh dissolves and Dublin at the turn of the century seeps through the gray.

On a great brass bed amid tumbled covers, Molly Bloom/Leventon tosses and turns her way through her night thoughts, and we with her, reflecting on the amorous adventures of the sleeping husband beside her, remembering her own first love and yesterday's lover.

Examining her body for beauty, for blemishes, now full of romantic yearning, now all explicit sexual references that never offends because of its truth.

Writing so long ago, Joyce was forcefully aware of the fierce sexual repression that has produced modern feminism. Here this wondrous wordsong has found a singer. Patricia Leventon is Molly Bloom.