Excerpts from the Odyssey (a new version by Gavin Kostick)

This performance took place as one of the Sunday at noon concerts in the Hugh Lane Gallery, but arguably it was more in the character of a theatrical event than a concert. It did feature music, composed and performed by pianist Andrew Synnott, but the event was more focused on Gavin Kostick's delivery of his adapted episodes from Homer's Odyssey, with the piano (mostly) coming in during breaks in Kostick's delivery, at which point it provided an accompaniment to the dancing of Megan Kennedy.

We were treated to three episodes from the Odyssey. First we have Odysseus and the last of his ships arriving on an island. He sends some of his crew to explore the interior, but only one of the party returns, to report that a sorceress has transformed the others into pigs. This of course is the beginning of the memorable encounter with Circe. Then we had a later episode in which Odysseus and his ship first sails past first the Sirens and then attempts to navigate the straits of the twin monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Finally we have a disguised Odysseus back in Ithaka, preparing to deal with the dissolute suitors who are trying to get his wife to marry one of them, eating her out of house and home while she demurs.

To my embarrassment, I have never actually read the Odyssey, either in translation or in the original archaic Greek. My Odyssey is still Barbara Leonie Picard's The Odyssey of Homer, which I read in primary school (despite my teacher warning that I would find the names too hard, which I took as a challenge). What struck me from Kostick's version was that it is not the events but the telling that is important: it's not that Scylla eats six of Odysseus's sailors as his ship goes past, but that as they are pulled away to their doom their eyes and arms desperately reach out to Odysseus in the pathetic hope that he will save them, reported by Odysseus to be "the most pitiable sight I ever saw out there on the waves of the sea" (I'm hoping that a full read of the Odyssey would explain why Odysseus had to sail past Scylla and her neighbour Charybdis, and not avoid them by retracing his steps and then returning home by his original route).

I mentioned that the music mostly accompanied Megan Kennedy's dancing. That felt like its own thing, separate to the storytelling, but still impressive in its own right. But I did like the moment when the piano joined in with the narration, with notes coming in just as Odysseus is approaching the Sirens, Synnott's playing suggesting their song heard by the bound Odysseus while his sailors row on with blocked ears.

I'm curious as to where this will go. Some years ago Kostick memorised all of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and then delivered it as a monologue in a theatrical event (the book is supposedly a story recounted after dinner so it kind of makes sense). But the Odyssey must be longer than that, particularly if you add in episodes of music and dance, surely much too long for a single performance? Or perhaps that is just me being a lightweight and we will soon discover that there is an audience out there for a 12 hour poetry-theatre-music-dance event adapted from Homer's classic.

image:

Joan Kiddell-Monroe cover for Barbara Leonie Picard's The Odyssey of Homer (Goodreads)