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If you decide to sit on the front row for ‘Stink Foot’, Jeff James’s reworking of Sophocles’s ‘Philoctetes’, you’ll find yourself provided with protective plastic sheeting. You’d would be wise to use it, too, as things are liable to get a little sticky. James’s production is saturated in treacle. Yep, actual treacle. There’s a bathtub full of the stuff on stage and Tate & Lyle even get a thank you in the programme.
The wounded Philoctetes has been confined to the island of Lemnos with only vultures for company. A snake bite has left him with a festering foot. His leg is slowly rotting. He’s in constant agony. And he stinks. He languishes there for a decade, until Odysseus sends young Neoptolrmus to try and trick him into re-joining the Trojan Wars.
Daniel Millar plays Philoctetes with his leg splinted and wrapped in (more) plastic sheeting. As he hobbles and slides around the stage he leaves smears of dark, gloopy stuff in his wake. The floor becomes increasingly foul, with the resultant mess, looking a bit like shit, a bit like old blood, the whole place tainted with decay and betrayal. Joshua Miles’s Neoptolemus turns up wearing pristine white sports gear, but soon, having dangled salvation over Philoctetes’s sticky, icky head, he too – his skin, his basketball shorts, even his socks – become contaminated with it.
Rosie Thomson’s Odysseus, meanwhile, is quite the manipulator, in every sense, manning the tech desk, unplugging cables, moving spotlights around the stage.
Both Millar and Miles are funny and vulnerable in different ways and the whole thing makes for a bold and accessible take on Greek Tragedy, though the mess – the cloying sweet smell of treacle under stage lights, the continual retching and spitting – eventually becomes a bit overwhelming.