Hestia was the goddess of the hearth, and we’re gathered here tonight, Stephen Fry tells us, in tribute to her. So park those thoughts of Wodehousian repartee from telly’s favourite polymath. Suspend expectations of showbiz anecdote. This is about old-fashioned storytelling around the fire, says Fry. It may seem surprising that 3,500 people have assembled in Hammersmith for a lecture-cum-recital of Greek myths – but, that’s what it says on the tin, and that’s what they’re getting.
The show marks the publication of Fry’s Heroes, the follow-up to Mythos, his 2017 compendium of tales from ancient Greece. Its opening half hour sets up his love affair with Zeus, Hercules and co, sketching out the cosmology for those of us bereft of a classical education. Not that Fry condescends: the several “as you probably knows” he inserts after telling us about this or that god or wing-heeled hero sound quite genuine.
It’s all done with characteristic bookishness: Fry delights in telling us how Hera’s breast milk gave us the word for galaxy, and how Hercules may have been a product of heteropaternal superfecundation. (“I’m sounding like a thesaurus at the moment …”) It’s a relief, though, when he moves on from this Olympian inventory, which feels like a lot of information. The stories that follow, he tells us, influenced everyone from Tolkien to JK Rowling to Marvel Comics – but in Fry’s retelling, they’re a little less epic. Aethra telling Theseus the tale of his paternity is not shy of Carry On-style innuendo. Zeus having sex with Danae in the form of golden rain cues up the obvious fetish gag. Perseus meeting the Graeae – all northern accents and catty backchat – sounds like Alan Bennett.
When the same hero squares up to a Gorgon’s reflection in his shield, the analogy Fry reaches for concerns trimming one’s eyebrows in the bathroom mirror. This is deliberate: Fry regrets that many find the classics distant and intimidating. Best not think of Philoctetes and Clytemnestra, he says: just call them Arnold and Susan.
His rewritings are domesticated, then – but not revisionist. To this storyteller, Medusa is just “appallingly foul”: there’s no allowance made for her story’s blatant misogyny. Fry talks reverently about Promethean fire and human exceptionalism, about Icarus and the drive towards progress that the Greeks seeded at the heart of our civilisation. From an Anthropocene vantage point, some might question whether the impulse to build one’s own wings and fly suicidally close to the sun ought to be celebrated. Not Fry; he thinks it’s what makes us great.
Sometimes he overreaches, straining for – but not demonstrating – Armistice Day parallels between Theseus and the soldiers of the first world war. That section gets its biggest cheer when Fry brings Blackadder’s braying General Melchett momentarily to life. Elsewhere, there’s big audience love for a Woody Allen impersonation and an aside about his narration of the Harry Potter audiobooks.
It’s an engaging if not exciting evening around Fry’s hearth. His love radiates warmly from the stage for these tales of the heroic and the divine – even if his audience are most animated when, however briefly, he tells stories from closer to home.
At Hammersmith Apollo, London, on 13 November.
