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Modern telling of an ancient tale
The Odyssey Derby Theatre ***** I CURSED the
motorway and its 15-mile tailback which prevented me catching the early
evening staged preamble to Derby Theatre’s world premiere of
The Odyssey.
For what I missed was
Caroline Horton, directed by Lucy Doherty, in
Penelope Retold,
her daring one-person show re-enacting the fraught long years passed
waiting by Odysseus’ patient, put-upon wife. With our scrupulously loyal if exhausted heroine
ensconced on a vast higgledy-piggledy marital bed, sunk among the
flotsam of a life with and without a man, this imaginative show, n I enquired of some of the young teens and 20-somethings around me later that evening how they had found this feminine take on Homer, and they assured me it was riveting: that Horton’s performance was gripping, aptly dotty and poignant; that the atmosphere in the theatre space was tense and rapt; that the moods swung from nostalgic and tender to dangerous and angry as her world (and the bed) implodes. What they saw in Penelope was a real and tangible, self-exposing, battered and repressed whole person, whose ardent hopes and fears and not least, bitter resentment build to a depressing, unexpected end. As much at sea as her husband - Caroline Horton stars in her one-man pre-play about Penelope My reward for M1 persistence was The Odyssey
itself, Mike Kenny’s wholly fresh and original take on the Homeric myth.
This is a terrific, life-enhancing show, enacted by eight polished
actors (three girls and five men), two of whom, the commanding and
utterly engaging Wole Sawyerr and the affectingly doubting Emma Beattie,
take the parts of the errant husband and not-errant wife; and half a
dozen of whom took on multiple roles – dutiful, mysterious, alluring,
aggressive. These included one breathtakingly beautiful
singer, Anna Westlake, her solo from the auditorium touching in the
extreme, amid the folk music that perambulated Sarah Brigham’s
galvanised, refined, constantly well-moved in-house staging; and a
fiddler from the cast (Ivan Stott, also the hospitable Alcinous) who
wrought such adorable minstrel sounds one could have listened to him all
evening. The ensemble is at home in a medieval-style round as a modern
mock-ditty or Georgian or Queen Anne catch that could come from John
Blow or John Gay. In an initial trompe-l’oeil, the wine-dark
Aegean (later Ionian) Sea predominates: - a vast blue cloth that later
rears up again to form the terrifying devouring whirlpool Scylla. A
recurrent feature throughout is a large (also dissectible) cable drum
that in the Polyphemus scene (Christopher Price as the man-eating giant,
poised on disconcertingly sturdy stilts, supplied a disgruntled
sheep-adoring monstrosity, sporting a miner’s lamp as his single steely
blue gaze) seemed like an ominous giant eye itself, an ill presence
forever scowling at the audience: one of designer Barney George’s many
fine touches; his seaweed or wrack-strewn cave, chthonic, earthbound,
being another. Ella Vale, later so effective as the
suitor-seducing maid who meets a graphic sticky end, supplies both a
delicate benign nymph Nausicaa and an equally rapacious, almost
see-through Circe: a sly, inveigling presence and an actress you don’t
quickly forget. The human-played baas and oinks - and the
Odysseus-bearing ram - are pretty memorable too. These epic
Sawyerr’s canny Trojan hero is robust and convincing throughout, a hero of flesh and blood as well as brain and sword, equally convincing when lusting for the sensual Circe, strapped to the mast so he can hear the Sirens’ song; caring for his loyal retainers; grieving for his men; a dignified father and husband. Resisting the elements - Wole Sawyerr as Odysseus (atop) with Ivan Stott on violin Rich Dolphin’s Telemachus is a diffident, awkward
19 year old, lacking in nous but not in noble good intentions. A
special joy is Ivan Stott’s creaky swineherd Eumaeus, the wrinkled
retainer who is the first to whom Odysseus (latterly) reveals himself;
Anna Westlake’s Eurycleia (the nurse) is sympathetic and trustworthy;
Adam Horvath a bitter Antinous; while Price’s Cyclops morphs ominously
into Eurymachus, the most uncouth and dangerous of the savagely
self-indulgent, sprawling interlopers gaily bankrupting Ithaca’s palace. But capping it all is the teamwork, as this cast shifts with ease from role to role, and interacts to form the leader’s dependable, deferential crew. The show wins time after time with Brigham’s inteligent stagecraft, showing the city-university run Derby Theatre, here at least, well up to the A1 calibre of Stephen Edwards old Derby Playhouse Mike Kenny’s chiselled text works as many wonders as Tim Skelly’s experienced lighting: most appealing of when Kenny swerves into near-Shakespeare (‘My home is more of a sty than is your byre’, ‘This shows neither good manners nor common decency’, ‘You have convinced my unbelieving head’, ‘Sweep and wash and make the place smell honey-sweet’), achieving an adaptation of Homer’s spirit and tight-packed epithets as stirring and emotive in its way as Virgil’s Aeneid – or in other respects, The Tempest. A splendid achievement, vivid and memorable. To 01-03-14. Roderic Dunnett
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much off an hour long, gives us the feminine point of view.
scenes
three millennia old are each sprucely captured in this effective,
poetically-honed pruning, Only one sequence seemed to droop visually and
dramatically – the release of the winds by the curious crew, who look
for gold and release a stormy maelstrom that dashes hopes of return.
None of them, bar the boss, will make it home.