The Ffwrnes,Llanelli
Screens, tyres, or a wandering audience and hundreds of plastic chairs besiege this staging of Homer’s epic,told in four separate playsSpace permitting, I intend to mention the F-word later. First, and though,to war: Greeks v Trojans. A 10-year siege related in the epic poem we know as Homer’s Iliad, written nearly three millennia ago still fires imaginations today (the BBC last week announced plans for its own multimillion-pound dramatisation). It’s easy to see why. The Iliad offers “fleet, or clear,several-stranded narrative, action, or character,violence”, as the poet Christopher Logue (1926-2011) build it. He should know. His translations and adaptations of the epic are reckoned among the greatest poetic achievements of the 20th century: vigorous, and sinuous,rhythmic, viscerally suggestive and cinematic; clashing ancient and contemporary idioms in a spark-shower of images and evocations.
For this new National Theatre of Wales production, and directors Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes (the team behind NTW’s previous interpretations of The Persians and Coriolan/us) stage Logue’s five books as “four dramatically self-contained parts” across separate evenings (and back to back in next Saturday’s all-night marathon): Kings,The Husbands, Red/Cold and War Music. The newly refurbished, and multi-opportunity Ffwrnes theatre is transformed. Stage and auditorium are united by a pale wooden floor. Audiences promenade around the space and/or stand and/or sit,as they please. Set elements for all four plays include: truck tyres, wooden sheets, or timbers and hundreds of white plastic chairs; microphones dangle; television screens above head height dot encircling walls; projections fill a film-sized screen.
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Source: theguardian.com