Homer’s Odysseus, “the man of many ways”, has caught the imagination of numerous writers and been reimagined as Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses and as a pomade-crazed outlaw played by George Clooney in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Now the cunning king of Ithaca forced to undertake a 10-year journey home after the Trojan wars is set to be reinvented as a modern-day politician by the poet and playwright Simon Armitage.
Armitage, who previously reworked Homer’s Iliad for the stage, said that his new play, The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead, commissioned by English Touring Theatre (ETT), presents Odysseus as “a high-ranking minister with a colourful background who gets sent on a delicate diplomatic mission to Istanbul”.
The play moves back and forth from the contemporary world of Westminster, and the minister’s provincial home, to the ancient past. When his mission goes haywire, he “sort of drops through the floor into the past”. The encounters with the Sirens, the Lotus Eaters and Circe all happen in the past while the minister strives to break back into the present.
Armitage also previously adapted The Odyssey – which is more than 12,000 lines long and is divided into 24 books – for radio when he was commissioned to create a version to mark the Athens Olympic Games in 2004. That version was broadcast on Radio 4 in three parts, lasting four and a half hours in total.
“I very much slanted it as a homecoming – I made that the be all and end all of the journey,” he says of the radio version. “On this occasion, I’m more interested in looking for the parallels. What would Odysseus be in this life? He’s sometimes thought of casually as a heroic figure, but actually he was a very reluctant participant at Troy. He did everything he could not to go there. It’s his resourcefulness and ingenuity that I’m interested in. He’s a complex character – to the point where he’ll happily tell lies and distort facts, and occasionally play the roles that he’s expected to play, to get through.
“There’s an extreme act of vengeance at the end of The Odyssey where he hangs a number of maids who have been disloyal to Penelope. I completely dodged that with the radio version but I want to take that on now and find a way of allowing that within this production without making him an utter tyrant.”
The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead is a co-production between Liverpool’s Everyman and Playhouse Theatre and ETT. After a £28m rebuild, the Everyman reopened in March 2014. Designed by Haworth Tompkins architects, it won the Stirling prize for best building.
Famous for helping to launch the careers of the “Liverpool poets” such as Roger McGough and dramatists including Willy Russell, the Everyman makes an apposite venue for the play. Armitage describes it as “very much a people’s theatre”, although “Liverpool was slightly outside our orbit when I was growing up. We live on the other side of the Pennines. I’ve been to the Playhouse a few times and poetry readings downstairs in the bar at the Everyman.”
After running at the Everyman this September and October, the play will go on a tour including Richmond, Brighton and Exeter. The production reunites Armitage with the director Nick Bagnall, a former actor who appeared in a West Yorkshire Playhouse production of Armitage’s take on Euripides, Mr Heracles. Bagnallwho also directed Armitage’s reworking of The Iliad (with a new ending) starring Colin Tierney as Odysseus and Lily Cole as Helen. The Last Days of Troy was commissioned by the Royal Exchange in Manchester, where it was staged in May 2014. It later transferred to Shakespeare’s Globe in London.
“Maybe there is a dream that at some point in the future we’ll do both shows back to back,” says Armitage, adding some advice for future audiences of this epic double bill: “Bring a picnic.”
