The Odyssey

Now in its fourteenth year, the annual open air theatre show at The Scoop, in the shadow of Tower Bridge, is still free and it’s still just about value for money. 

Director Phil Willmott alternates each year between Ancient Greek stuff and other classics and, since 2016 brought a Toyah Wilcox musical based on Dostoyevsky’s 'Crime and Punishment', this time around we’re back to all things Hellenic for an adaptation of Homer’s 'Odyssey'.

It’s been split into three one-hour parts, with the first hour both the child-friendliest and the weakest. But by the time the cast has shaken off the initial inertia, the quality increases.

Part one rattles through the big set scenes of Homer’s story about Greek hero Odysseus's attempts to get home from the Trojan War. It makes swift work of the Cyclops, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis. A couple of the stories, narrated by the various crew members in the third person, are quite fun and a couple are pretty dull. 

For some reason the action is frequently sliced through with choruses of the Lightning Seeds’ Three Lions sung by the cast, lyrics reworked. The only explanation – tenuous at best – is that the song is about football 'coming home' and the story is about Odysseus 'going home'. Yeah…

Parts two and three are richer, with a couple of great performances from Adrian Decosta and Lawrence Boothman. Both capably fill the space in their various roles, Decosta with bundles of energy and Boothman with dry humour, plus PK Taylor makes for a great gender-bent Circe, playing the sorceress as a wizened old lush. The Scoop is huge, echoey, lit mostly by natural light and hosts an audience that's coming and going throughout the hour, but these actors do a grand job.

It's clear that the production’s working with a tiny budget in order to keep the shows free and accessible but the crew absolutely make the best of it, the audience is among the most diverse you’ll see in any London theatre and the setting, particularly as the evening beds in, lends itself perfectly to the summer atmosphere.