A dance interpretation of Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ sounds like quite a highbrow affair. Fear not. Choreographer Mark Bruce’s approach to this, his latest show, can best be explained as: what would Homer’s epic be like if Odysseus was played by Jason Statham? And strangely, much as with The Stath’s films, you find yourself becoming more and more (albeit unwillingly) intrigued, until you end up suspecting the whole thing might possibly have a kind of twisted genius.
Christopher Tandy is our glowering, shaven-headed, tattooed, dancing Stath stand-in. The whole of the Trojan War seems to happen while he stands front stage right, smoking a cigarette and looking surly. He smokes a lot, sometimes flicking the fag butts contemptuously at others, and flicking his Zippo open and shut menacingly.
The gods (Eleanor Duval and Christopher Akrill, a late stand-in for Jonathan Goddard) flit about, being troublesome, bellicose, sometimes downright nasty. And Odysseus’s travails as he tries to make it home play out like a kind of dark cabaret-cum-Lynchian American road trip, soundtracked by everything from Mozart and Mark Lanegan to Sinatra and Sonic Youth. Calypso (Grace Jabbari) is a lonely diner waitress, for instance, left holding a baby when Odysseus heads off again (no laydeez can resist him, of course). The Cyclops, in a truly bizarre twist, is a bad Santa in an eye-patch, complete with sexy helpers. Meanwhile, back at home, Penelope (Hannah Kidd) is having the years her husband has been away scored into her back (a viscerally effective image) and Telemachus is being used for knife-throwing practice by the Suitors who have taken over Odysseus’s palace. Knowing the carnage to come when our hero returns and takes revenge, you can’t help but feel rather excited at the thought of the can of whoop-ass he’ll open on them…
Among all this, there is some good dancing. Bruce has an assured choreographic style and here gives his lead women a real chance to shine: they are just as defiant and powerfully determined as Odysseus in their duets with him. The episodic nature of the piece (emphasised by those constant radical musical shifts) can mean you sometimes have no idea what’s going on, and definitely means dancers have to stand stage front and stare meaningfully at the back wall between scenes rather too often. But Phil Eddells inventive set works hard, and Guy Hoare’s lighting design makes the most of Wilton’s Music Hall’s atmospherics. Forget subtlety: you feel more like you’ve been driven through a wall than immersed in one of literature’s great works, but there’s a certain guilty pleasure in that.
BY: SIOBHAN MURPHY