ODYSSEY

A fresh, fun and astonishing Odyssey like you have never imagined it. A hilarious journey into the fantastic world evoked by one of Homer's masterpieces.

Since its debut, the Odyssey has travelled by sea and land beyond the Alps and across Europe. The production has been presented everywhere: in Russia as far as Siberia, in the Baltic states, in Pakistan, Armenia, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, and even in its native land, Greece, winning wide acclaim from critics and audiences everywhere.

This award-winning international theatre company presents the audience with a modern reinterpretation of Homer’s epic about Odysseus’s adventurous return to Ithaca: his hopes, his weaknesses, his heroic and erotic adventures as he faces and defeats the Sirens, the Cyclops Polyphemus, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis and the pretenders to his throne. A dazzling performance full of rhythm, movement, imagination and originality, from which emerges an unprecedented portrait of the Achaean hero: intense, ironic, human.

With his two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer describes what was real. Intensely real is the outward world of the Iliad, just as intensely real is the inward world of the Odyssey.

It is no accident that the Iliad alludes to a place, whilst the Odyssey alludes to the journey of a soul: that of Ulysses.

It is an intense, ironic and deeply human portrait of the cunning Ulysses that springs to life with rhythm and movement, through the intelligence, the fantasy and the originality of a supremely enjoyable staging. An unforgettable performance.

Theatre unplugged.

For a theatre company like ours, searching for new theatrical forms, for a fusion of imagination with body, voice and language, performing its productions around the world, the Odyssey is a material as ideal as it could possibly be.

Theatre in its purest form!
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

The fantastic world of gods, demigods and monsters, and among them, tiny yet mighty, Odysseus. Odysseus the cunning, Odysseus the wrathful, Odysseus the endurer: a forerunner of Don Quixote, though less fanciful, and with deadly Scylla and Charybdis as adversaries instead of windmills and wineskins – yet he too is thrown back again and again, seemingly hopeless, a fighter against the undefeatable, against fantastic beings that here are still real.

The most brilliant Performance of the Festival!
The News, Lahore, Pakistan

With him his companions: sailors, brave warriors who blunder into Circe's trap, who would follow the deadly song of the Sirens if their leader did not prevent them by cunning. Men who, briefly unsupervised, finally give in to their hunger and pay for it with their lives.

And finally Odysseus's wife Penelope, his son Telemachus: people of the highest integrity, morality and trust, surrounded by suitors who “laughed with horribly contorted faces and swallowed blood-spattered meat.” Penelope and Telemachus, who hold out with only a few loyal followers and find the knowledge, from somewhere, that Odysseus will return and free them.

Humans so divine, and gods so human.

Extremely unusual at the New York Festival: a standing ovation
CurtainUp, New York

The world has changed in the thousands of years since Odysseus, yet globalised suitors still cheerfully slaughter the cattle in our own house, television bewitchingly turns us into swine, one-eyed financial giants delight in our visit to their enormous cave.

And the Odyssey goes on…

The Odyssey stands as an example of the birth of a literary work that fixes, within a novelistic structure, stories and tales until then handed down by word of mouth.

Homer’s work has been reworked and re-elaborated; the material has been improvised upon, tested and researched in order to bring back to life figures such as Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, the Cyclopes, Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Circe, Scylla, Charybdis, Tiresias, the sacred cattle, the Suitors, and others besides, and to conjure spaces such as the gigantic cavern of Polyphemus, the underworld of Hades, the Strait of Messina, the tempestuous sea, the island of Aeaea and more – all of it whilst remaining seated on two chairs, without props, scenic or sound effects, or costume changes.

The necessity of making cuts, and the construction of the dramaturgy, are subordinated to the demands of our style, our way of performing using only the voice, the body, movement, gesture and facial expression, working forcefully upon the imagination. The result will assuredly be an Odyssey never before seen or heard.

To host ODYSSEY at your theatre, festival or cultural venue, contact the production.