FringeReview UK 2023
Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime
A Jermyn Street Theatre and Charles Court Opera Co-Production
Genre: Classical and Shakespeare, Comedy, Costume, Fringe Theatre, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Musical Theatre, Theatre
Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Jermyn Street Theatre has memorably hosted the Odyssey – twice: in November 2020 with 72 actors over zoom; and in August 2021 live with a slimmer 16. Add a reading of Joyce’s Ulysses to this Tardis-like Homeric hub and it might just be a franchise.
So it’s perfectly logical that writer/director John Savournin, and composer/arranger/sound designer David Eaton bring Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime to Jermyn Street till December 31st. It’s co-produced with Charles Court Opera featuring five of its regulars multi-roling and rollicking over a delicious script, riffing off a smorgasbord of seventies hits.
This compact one hour 45 show must run again. The most inventive, best-written and possibly best-sung panto in Town.
Written and Directed by John Savournin, Music Director and Composer, Arranger and Sound Designer David Eaton,
Designer Stuart J Charlesworth, Lighting Ben Pickersgill, Choreographer Blair Anderson, Assistant Director Ben Grant, Assistant Lighting Designer Laura Howard, Costume Supervisor Ellen Beaumont Hulme, Assistant Producer Antonia Georgieva
Production Manager Lucy Mewis-McKerrow, Stage Manager Octavia Penes, Assistant Production Manager William Edwards, Assistant Stage Manager Louisa Wright, Production Technician Ted Walliker
Costume Buyer Evelyn Butcher, Costume Makers Shannah Foster & Sally Hurst, Wardrobe assistants Katie Buchanan, Dante De-Antonis, Harry Gilsenan, Gabi Rose &Alisa Tsyplakova, Prop Maker Jamie Kubisch-Wiles, Scenic Construction Big House Events, scenic Artist Kristina Debenham
PR David Burns, Marketing/Production Photography Bill Knight, Programme Design Ciaran Walsh at CIWA, Producer Gabriele Uboldi
Special thanks to Christine Gazelidis and Simon Spence
Till December 31st
Review
Jermyn Street Theatre has memorably hosted the Odyssey – twice: in November 2020 with 72 actors over zoom; and in August 2021 live with a slimmer 16. Add a reading of Joyce’s Ulysses to this Tardis-like Homeric hub and it might just be a franchise.
So it’s perfectly logical that writer/director John Savournin, and composer/arranger/sound designer David Eaton bring Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime to Jermyn Street till December 31st. It’s co-produced with Charles Court Opera featuring five of its regulars multi-roling and rollicking over a delicious script, riffing off a smorgasbord of seventies hits.
There is a plot, but certainly no spoilers here. If you think you know the Odyssey (and JST regulars have been exposed to much of it), well it helps to see just what Savournin and Eaton don’t do, or invert.
It helps there’s a deceptively sophisticated set: Stuart J Charlesworth’s roller-coaster backdrop is parti-coloured as pantomimes should be with a large portal and all sorts of Greek emblems. Ben Pickersgill’s wave-lighting involves spotlighting of lettering too. Dave Jennings is a sensitive and fun percussionist on stage throughout.
Gods dispute over what to do with Circe-charmed Odysseus ten years after the fall of Troy. Cut to Ithaka, where Penelope (Emily Cairns) agonises with a demoted Hermes (Tamoy Phipps) and Trojan Horse (Meriel Cunningham) over whether Odysseus is alive or not.
Trojan’s a horse adopted by Odysseus who found their way over to Ithaka on another ship, expecting to meet their master. Cunningham’s solo is the most ringing and affecting of the evening, a beautiful soprano range, notwithstanding the horse-head. Oh and terrible constipation.
So off they flourish to mind-altering puns (is there a porpoise to it?) to meet various tribulations on the way. Rosie Strobel occasionally Aries but most often Circe plots their demise in a rerun of familiar adventures.
Except…. here’s ferocious Cyclops (Amy J Payne, delivering west-country vowels with wonderful singing) but after some horrors with a blinding T-bone steak it seems Polyfefifofumnus (just Polly) is a friendly soul who only eats sheep and jogs along. Not least because she and Trojan have a thing. even when occasionally Poseidon
There’s plenty of interaction. Phipps as a misfiring Hermes gets fired from the Gods, successively relegated to Deliveroo (that works…) Uber and Royal Mail. We’re enjoined to cheer her up with a chorus.
Strobel’s shape-shifting provides another highlight, virtually her only benign avatar in a word of delicious cackles (Strobel delights in getting us high on her supply of them). But Cilla and Charybdis? A Playdough competition? And what do those Sirens sound like? Not like Boney M’s ‘Ro-ro-Rasputin’, repurposed to something else altogether.
But the consummation of blissful transmogrification is surely both a chorus of Circe’s little piggie or a brief aria for one principal member to Staying Alive now “Oink oink oink oink becoming a pig, becoming a pig….”
Cairns also doubles as a slinky pink Aphrodite in blonde wig, Phipps enjoys a cheery number as Cerebrus and Cunningham as an incomprehensible Bacchus, clubbing with Payne’s bearded Poseidon and whilst Strobel pops up as Aries she always springs surprises.
Performances are first rate but the script – it’s tempting to quote so much from it – is superb and should be permanently available. Most of all it pays homage whilst inverting known adventures, in the feminist spirit of say the Wanamaker’s Women of Arabian Nights last December. Here Savourin celebrates the Idiocy (well they trash the Iliad here, so why not rechristen this epic?) by crafting new pantomime characters, redeeming some villains and demonising an enchantress – Circe enjoys good press in the original Odyssey, but here is all greened and purpled. Shout out to Charlesworth, costume supervisor Ellen Beaumont Hulme an cast for 12-second changes of some magnificently outré costumes too.
This might be the silliest stuff that e’er I saw at Jermyn Street: it even puts a coupling of Jane Austen’s teenage Love and Freindship (yes spelled that way) coupled with Byron’s Don Juan Canto 1 from 1995, and The Massive Tragedy of Madam Bovary! last year and a few 2021 gigs in the shade. This compact one hour 45 show must run again. The most inventive, best-written and possibly best-sung panto in Town.
