ONCE again, the Liverpool Everyman has hosted the premiere of an English Touring Theatre production. Once again it has proved its ground-breaking credentials with a combination of risk-taking, stunning stagecraft and scenario shifting.
And while The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead pays homage to the essentials of Odysseus's Aegean adventures, it weaves in and out of a darkly contemporary, high stakes political plot.
It's almost like having two plays rolled into one where each feeds off the other for plot and character development which, incidentally, refers back to Simon Armitage's previous production of The Last Days of Troy at the Shakespeare Globe in 2014.
The introduction seems innocuous enough, with a British Prime Minister (Simon Dutton) hoping to get general election brownie points by sending a low-ranking Cabinet member Smith (Colin Tierney) to a FIFA World Cup decider game in Istanbul.
What could go wrong? Well, practically everything, as it happens, and Smith ends up having to dive into the Bosphorus to escape arrest after a bar-room brawl involving English fan Fenton (Chris Reilly), his aide Soli (Sule Rimi) and friend McGill (Roger Evans).
They soon emerge from these murky depths as Odysseus, Perimides, Polites and Eurylochus: the resurrected crew of Odysseus's doomed ship as it traverses across the myth-laden waters of the Aegean.
There follows a series of encounters with Cyclops, the Sirens, armies of the dead, fragrant islands bursting with sexual desire enticed by Circe (Danusia Samal) but with porcine traps. This journey of legends and mythic quests is ably supported by a variety of innovative stage designs – more notably in the self-assembly boat and swaying stage. The Everyman doesn’t do things by half.
The evolution of these two strands – contemporary political intrigue worthy of Scandinavian murder plots, against the Greek epic, is a novel departure and certainly adds flavour to the crisis management Whitehall-speak as the PM and daughter Anthea (Polly Frame) struggle to keep the lid on the unfolding events. Meanwhile Odysseus’s ship finds itself in its own rock and hard place between the Scylla and Charybdis.
However, it does take some time to get accustomed to these dual strands and it works better after the interval as the divergent plots became clearer. Also, the stronger roles of the female characters become more evident, notably in the diatribes of Smith’s long-suffering wife, Penelope (Susie Trayling), supported by her son Magnus (Lee Armstrong).
Smith’s Istanbul disappearance has created a media frenzy with a band of paparazzi invading their privacy. Penelope’s decision to sell her story to the highest bidder seems plausible, which may not have been equally so for Magnus’s recitation of Homer’s book, which he had been given as a birthday present.
That said, you have to give credit to Nick Bagnall’s co-production for being given the liberty to experiment within the Everyman’s creative spaces, certainly in helping to make Homer’s Odyssey more accessible to a 21st century audience.
There are times when it was indeed possible to say that “we got it”, such as the PM's anti-European polemical rant, the improvised insertion of the pig’s head into the script and the closing jibe at the UKOC party. As far as Odysseus’s own speeches went, they were a joy to the ear. Such were the contrasts between them and the modern idiom which resulted in a decided preference for heroic soliloquies.
This is a production worth seeing since it’s designed to illuminate the world of the House of Cards with a rich undercurrent of prosaic ancient narratives. His adventures over, Smith/Odysseus’s eventual return home is peppered with an amicable closure of sorts yet we are left with him struggling with demons not entirely of his own making.
8/10
*The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead runs until Saturday October 17 and then goes on national tour.
