Homer’s Iliad isn’t just a foundational Hellenic text: it’s the great primal myth of war, sacred and eternal. Its gods and mortals alike are monstrous, heroic and pitiful, endlessly iterative and contemporary. We’ve been treading and retreading this same material for almost 3,000 years, not to exorcise violence but to ritualise and sanctify it. Only the Mahabharata can hold a candle to the Iliad’s immensity and continued intellectual relevance.
While all that cultural weight is enough to make a modern playwright quake, Tom Wright – whose writing for the stage has encompassed the mythologies of Orestes, Medea and Oedipus, to name only a few – is made of sterner stuff. He launches headlong into the colossal tale with the brio and control of the old masters. While the Iliad is the primary text here, Wright also folds in details from Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil, as well as inventions of his own. The result is shocking, chilling, funny and often breathtakingly beautiful, a grounded piece of epic theatre that fringes the divine.
