Forty years after the 1984 miners’ strike, Tim Price’s play maps Homer’s Odyssey on to events that already carry the weight of their own mythology. Our Odysseus is Welsh miner John O’Donnell (Rhodri Meilir) who is subjected to the caprices of unseen authority figures and must journey to faraway lands.
His wife, Penny, faithfully – if not passively – awaits for his return in a drama where the women do much of the heavy lifting. Sara Gregory is excellent in the role, becoming the production’s emotional core, and the delicacy of the brief scenes with her friend Shaz (a wonderful Lisa Zahra), focusing on the activities of women who sustained their communities during the strike, are the most affecting.
The men are left to their adventuring and rousing speeches. Sion Pritchard is excellent as Billy, and Matthew Bulgo and François Pandolfo do stellar work in several smaller roles. Performed against the imposing backdrop of set designer Carl Davies’s increasingly claustrophobic coal seam, lit by Rachel Mortimer, the conceptual ambition is admirable.
It is therefore a little puzzling that at almost every turn Joe Murphy’s production – and sometimes Price’s text – appear fearful of complexity and reluctant to trust the audience to understand nuance. Every sentiment and motivation is heavily signalled; subtext and dramatic tension are effaced. Pop songs from the 80s play during scene changes, with the lyrics reinforcing the dramatic action, as if it wasn’t already sufficiently clear. There is a surprising amount of comedy, but much of it is similarly broad.
Real and harrowing individual traumas, in addition to larger historical events, are retrofitted into the narrative turns of a Homerian epic. The hardships of hundreds of thousands are refracted through a single fictional family. You can’t help but feel that in elevating a socioeconomic catastrophe to the status of a myth, especially when it is drawn in inexplicably broad strokes, the play risks making a more interesting human drama recede into history.
• At Sherman theatre, Cardiff, until 26 October
