Mark Bruce is a director/choreographer/composer who builds structures that dig deeply into narrative, playing with linearity and stretching imagination, through the integration – one might say, layering - of his dramaturgy, movement and music. His process requires considerable research, which means that a new Bruce production is uncommon and generally well worth the wait. The Odyssey is his fifth new project over the past decade and follows on from the huge critical acclaim – including two National Dance Awards – achieved for Dracula (2013). This new work is inventive, visually appealing, challenging, loud and hyperactive.
The production also sits so well inside this unique venue. Wilton’s Music Hall is becoming the London theatre of choice for the Mark Bruce Company, which also brought Dracula and its predecessor, Made in Heaven (2012), to this stage. Wilton’s is the only intact survivor of the Grand Victorian era of Music Hall and was in use as such through most of the latter part of the nineteenth century. It retains an extraordinary atmosphere of decaying, theatrical grandeur that provides an arresting intimacy, which seems to work especially well for Bruce’s brand of narrative-based dance theatre.
Taking on The Odyssey is a massive challenge and one that Bruce sets about with his usual fanciful inventiveness. Anyone who can bring Santa Claus and a bevy of red-coated “Clausettes” into an interpretation of Homer’s text deserves to be tagged as an innovator. It is one of many scenes that enliven what would otherwise be a turgid text. Nonetheless, the quick-fire episodic nature of the work can be taxing, particularly in a long first act, during which I sometimes struggled to map the action onstage onto my rudimentary knowledge of Odysseus’ return from Troy.
The set – designed by Phil Eddolls – is brilliant in its simplicity. A large oval-shaped structure, upstage, acts as a gateway, a platform, and opens up to form the prow of a boat, designed to fit the “sword and sandal” imagery of the Trojan wars. Speaking of swords, the risk assessment for this show must have been fun. Not only are there cigarettes to be smoked and thrown, but there are daggers and swords galore with plenty of throat-cutting and blood-letting: a scene in which Odysseus’ faithful wife, Penelope (enigmatically and excellently portrayed by Hannah Kidd) has her back lacerated with marks to denote the years of her husband’s absence is especially vivid. And the episode in which Odysseus (a brooding Christopher Tandy) strings his giant bow to fire an arrow through a dozen axe-heads, is an excellent feat of illusion, even when seen at close quarters.