If you stumbled across Andreas Litras's little show at the Edinburgh festival, you would be delighted. But it is a little show, and somehow the Pit seems far too grand a venue for it - particularly when it is played as a postscript to Tantalus. Litras entertainingly sums it up when he points out that Tantalus took nine hours to tell the story of The Iliad. He does it in less than a minute.
But this physical theatre piece isn't about the siege of Troy, it is about the personal odyssey of Litras and his family that began when his father made the long journey from Greece to Australia after the civil war. It is a journey that still continues as the next generation reclaims its heritage, naming and defining itself as Greek-Australian. Andrew becomes Andreas and finds himself.
All this is touchingly detailed with old family photos and entwined with stories from The Odyssey, such as the encounters with Cyclops and Circe, and patient Penelope getting just a touch impatient on the phone with her husband as he dawdles in foreign parts too long. The result is like looking at a stranger's photo album and reading one of those children's Horrible History books at the same time. The way the legs of Cyclops's victims wriggle as they become a bite-sized snack is funny and grisly.
The odd mixture of personal storytelling and send-up works, partly because Litras himself is so personable, a genial comic presence who can get an audience on his side with a mere cock of the head, and partly because the physical-theatre skills are so strong. This show may not be sophisticated, but it isn't simple - there is a huge amount of skill and imagination at work here, and not just in the way a brush and a suitcase are transformed into the Trojan horse.
This kind of personal storytelling theatre is very much in vogue at the moment. Litras's piece demonstrates both its pleasures and its limitations.
Until June 2. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
