A stocky man wearing jeans and a T-shirt is washed up on the shore and is discovered by two immigration officers. "He's trying to get in under our noses," says one. "Bloody illegals," says the other. "You're going home, sunshine," says the first. "I want to go home," sighs the man. He is Odysseus, the wily Greek general who triumphantly ended the siege of Troy and has been tossed for over a decade on the high seas as he tries to make it home.
It is the emotional pain of exile and the meaning of home that provides the swell and tug of David Farr's gripping retelling of Homer's epic. There is a lot of refashioning going on here. Not only has Homer been transposed to the 21st century and the narrative reordered, but Bristol's 18th-century playhouse has been turned into a theatre in the round. Angela Davies provides a miraculous design where the flotsam and jetsam of rusty masts and old barrels washed up on a shore becomes the means to make a play.
The aesthetic owes much to Kneehigh in its simple, unaffected honesty, its belief in storytelling, the childlike (but never childish) wonder of theatre and its willingness to engage with its audience. The actors share the stage with puppets, Cyclops is a large lamp on a stick and the final moments when the survivors of sacked Troy - seeking asylum but longing for their lost homes - relive their terror and pain is an exhilarating demonstration of the healing possibilities of the imagination. Farr's ensemble is superb, Stu Baker's music is an atmospheric Mediterranean weave of the idiosyncratic and the haunting, and although the show loses energy after the interval, it mostly has the wind in its sails.
· Until March 12. Box office: 0117-987 7877. Then touring.
