The Iliad is a dark and claustrophobic tale; a story of battles and a besieged city, male bravado and violence, written in a propulsive dactylic hexameter that, when spoken in its original Greek, often sounds like the beating of war drums. It is also a heartbreaking story, shot through with the almost unbearable suffering of widowed women, elderly parents, and soldiers who have lost loved ones they feel they cannot live without.
An Iliad is not that. The clue is in the title. Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s play, showing at Sydney Theatre Company 12 years after its last outing in Australia, is as much interested in the telling of the tale as the tale itself. It honours the source of Homer’s 3,000-year-old text: centuries of oral transmission, with bards spinning their own versions of the story for lively, demanding audiences. It abridges 6,000-odd lines into a cracking tale with contemporary resonances and references (including a very long list of wars, updated to end with “Iran, US, Israel”), narrated by a world-weary Poet, who unspools the tale on a bare stage.
