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A good Piggate crack might seem reason enough to meld the world of politics with the Homeric epic of homecoming and adventure, but despite a few good ideas and that one good joke, ‘The Odyssey: Missing, Presumed Dead’ is a fractured and laborious mash-up. Adapted by Simon Armitage for director Nick Bagnall, it tries to marry the timeless with the timely, but except in a few isolated scenes, fails to bring them together at all.
Colin Tierney’s Odysseus is initially a maverick politician named Smith, reluctantly packed off to Turkey to show face at an international football game. One bar-room brawl later and he’s on the run from the police, hopping across the world as his party finds themselves at the centre of a global scandal and his wife Penelope at the mercy of door-stepping reporters.
That’s where the story cracks in two, as the clumsy device of the couple’s young son leafing through ‘The Odyssey’ is used to justify a more-or-less straight romp through the poem, as scenes of Tierney as armour-clad Odysseus alternate with those of the growing political shitstorm at home. Neither is much cop as a metaphor for the other, with both worlds simply running side by side until it’s far, far too late. This isn’t an updating of ‘The Odyssey’, merely a framing. Its cleverness is superficial, its purpose unclear.
Tierney is fun as Odysseus – even if he does speak like Treguard from kids’ TV show ‘Knightmare’ – and there are strong performances from Susie Trayling as Penelope and Simon Dutton as the Prime Minister and wandering Tiresias. But the production elements are as wobbly as the concept, with the ship’s deck an awkward creaking platform that the cast struggle to manipulate, and a giant paper-mache Cyclops that could have lumbered in from a local high school’s ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.