The Odyssey: Missing Presumed Dead claims Homer as the bard of shifting borders and a population on the move. Poet-playwright Simon Armitage and director Nick Bagnall weave together the 21st century and the eighth century BC. On a diplomatic mission to Turkey, a rough-diamond but top-rank UK politician gets caught up in a brawl which brings on his head the wrath of religious and secular leaders. He goes on the run and takes to the seas. At which point he becomes Odysseus, as if Homer’s hero was in his unconscious all along.
Simon Dutton is terrific as a furious, keep-’em-all-out PM (“every turd in a million square miles trying to squeeze through that soil pipe we call the Channel tunnel”). He is sometimes called Zeus. In Polly Frame’s beady performance, Athena is anagrammed into a spin doctor called Anthea. Colin Tierney’s Odysseus (alias Smith) is vibrant, both commanding and manipulative. He is a sort of anti-Jeremy Corbyn, dodgy and dominant.
These parallels are neat, and Signe Beckmann’s beautiful wood design, made up of resin-coloured geometric shapes, serves both ancient and modern. Armitage’s own language makes the distinction between the two worlds: flatter and angrier in the present; richer and more rhythmic in the past. Yet too much of the strength is in expression rather than structure. The two parts, both lively, are often shoehorned together, like Odysseus’s bark, which tips around the stage like an unreliable tea-tray. I struggled to find the modern impact of the comic Cyclops, an enormous puppet that looks like a corroded diving helmet. Less difficult to find is the relevance in Circe’s spell, which makes the sailors roll on the floor, trotters in the air, curly tails sprouting. What could they be thinking of? Bagnall is skippering a sometimes rickety though handsome ship – but then, our current ship looks leaky too.
• At the Everyman, Liverpool, until 17 October; and on tour until 28 November
