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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.
In this production, directed by Damien Ryan and designed by Charles Davis, our setting is a stripped-back warehouse space. For 100 minutes, it is transformed into a makeshift theatre with the aid of a suitcase of sand, some portable stage lights, and a handful of props. “In the old days, we’d be in a tavern, or a bar,” the Poet – played by David Wenham, carting a travelling storyteller’s wagon of wonders – tells us. “So much easier to talk about these horrors in a bar.”
It’s also far easier to talk about the horrors of war when you can take a break from them. Peterson and O’Hare’s play leans heavily into humour, transposing Homer’s tale into a jocular vernacular laced with levity. Pondering what caused the Trojan war – a 10-year siege in which hundreds of thousands died – the Poet tells us: “Ohhh … the gods, of course … um … pride, honour, jealousy … Aphrodite … some game or other, an apple, Helen being more beautiful than somebody – it doesn’t matter. The point is, Helen’s been stolen, and the Greeks have to get her back. It’s always something, isn’t it?”
Wenham is a great match for the role, an eminently likeable everyman who can transmit the sly charm and world-weariness of a jobbing entertainer. He is joined on stage by Helen Svoboda, a triple-threat composer, singer and double bass player – and the show’s hidden (literally, at first) weapon. She conjures a sonorous soundscape from bowing and plucking her instrument in inventive ways; the singing of prayers or wailing of women, with her voice; the rustle of fire, with paper scrunched into a mic; and various characters in the story – from wives to warriors – with her body.
Her solemn presence feels like a ballast to her stage partner’s natural affability. Because sometimes David “Diver Dan” Wenham is too likeable, too naturally comedic for the play’s good – and the audience is so on his side that on opening night, many more lines drew laughter than warranted it. In one of the play’s most plangent moments, the Poet tells us: “Every time I sing this song, I hope it’s the last time.” It’s the lament of someone who, like Sisyphus with his rock, feels doomed to keep spinning his cautionary tale about the destructive power of rage until humanity no longer needs it. On opening night, the pathos was punctured by laughter.
This is the key problem of An Iliad: how to balance humour and drama. It doesn’t always work, with emotionally powerful scenes too swiftly undercut by comic asides.
But when the playwrights and performers let themselves sink into the heavy heart of the story, something miraculous happens: we, the audience, start to feel this human drama deeply. As Wenham tells us of Andromache, wife of Trojan prince Hector, learning not only of her husband’s death but also the dishonouring of his body by the vengeful Achilles, Svoboda keens over her instrument as if it were a corpse. No words can convey the consequences of war more powerfully than the sound of a woman’s wailing, almost inhuman in its intensity; I wept.
Sometimes words fail us. Talking about war has apparently done very little to cure us of it; there’s a sense in this play that feeling the personal human cost is part of the answer – but this show sometimes feels like too much talking, and not enough feeling.
But at its best, this Iliad captures the dark magic of masterful oral storytelling, where cities and scenes are conjured in your mind’s eye; the discombobulating effect of battle clamour can be conjured with the jarring clash of metal prop with metal prop. And it makes us feel, for a moment, the intolerable human cost of war.
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