The Odyssey's knowing subtitle, A Trip Based on Homer's Epic, gives an indication of director/writer David Farr's intention in his adaptation. This is entry-level Homer for the Big Brother generation, easily assimilated by fledgling classicists and pitched by its producers at an audience from the age of ten upwards. While not to everyone's taste, it narrowly avoids the pitfalls of dumbing-down in favour of plain entertainment. After all, Farr is simply carrying on the same tradition of interpretation which the blind Bard himself probably followed - the retelling of a tale handed down the centuries by minstrels and storytellers to what was then around the late (8 BC.
      Less orthodox is his decision to make an asylum-seeker of Odysseus, who after his return from war washes up on his home shores only to be interrogated and imprisoned, Sangatte-style. (Appropriately enough, the ancients gave the original author - or authors - the name Homeros which means someone displaced and vulnerable.) In the second act, the fall of Troy - the means by which Odysseus achieved kleos, glory - is recounted by Odysseus' Trojan cell mates. Responsible for their diaspora and current statelessness, he must now confront his guilt through their suffering. By elaborating on this issue, Farr presumably encourages us to examine our own social conscience on the subject of today's refugee crisis.
      The notorious obstacles that Stephen Noonan's Odysseus must overcome to complete the nostos or homecoming to his wife Penelope after 20 years absence fighting the Trojan War, are recounted to his two guards, Roger and Harold (Colin Mace and Stuart Mcloughlin) in jail. This story-telling device is interspersed with remembered encounters as the staging cuts and pastes to action-adventure. Athena oversees the mortals, a towering asexual puppet inhabited by versatile Dave Fishley. All the supporting cast take on numerous roles, but Fishley was outstanding because of his physical motility and sonorous delivery. Video cameras, screen projections and recorded voice-overs update the trials for our television age.
      Farr has still more fun with his plotting and modern spin. The Land of the Lotus Eaters turns you into a stoned hippy; his Cyclops, an enormous one-eyed dalek of a monster; while Hades conjours a nightclub for the dead. Among the enchantresses, Circe's hour-glass houri turns men into swine, and the nymph Calypso (Mace again) is a pouting drag queen and simulacrum of Boy George. The swaggering Noonan - a moody poster-boy of coolness in cargo pants and T-shirt - energetically contrives the complexity of a hero 'of twists and turns'.
      Trojan exiles, appear as itinerant travellers, whose gypsy voices keen to melancholy tunes, bewailing their reversal of fortune. Later in the second act, we are treated to a re-enactment of the Trojan Horse debacle, which drags a little and could have done with abbreviation. This was a shame as Stu Barker and Farr co-wrote a beautiful signature song, but allowed it to be over-used.
      Farr the playwright has a way with words and the play's language is always easy on the ear even at its most colloquial. Odysseus' expressive soliloquy on his homeland Ithaca, sees the writer at his most poetic. Dialogue is also in the spirit of the original - occasionally bringing it directly to mind with phrases like 'rosy fingered dawn'. While the refugee camp setting is a brave idea - whether it entirely works is open to debate. Certainly, Farr the director invests all his energy into bringing it to life, and must be commended for the compassion and originality with which he imbues this retelling.
Caroline Kellett Fraysse