Before the Globe's winter season kicks off in earnest with the first Shakespeare
productions to be designed especially for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse*, there's
something of a Homeric mini-season as a taster. We start with the return of Joseph
Marcell in a piece he performed a couple of times last year, Derek Walcott's epic
poem
Omeros, which transposes some of the characters from the
Iliad to
the Caribbean setting of the poet's birthplace, St Lucia. So we have a fisherman
called Achille, at odds with Hector, who drives a bus to and from the airport, over
who owns a little rusted tin; and an elderly Philoctète who believes his rotten,
stinking foot is a curse passed down from his slave ancestors, a throwback to the
chains around their ankles. There's also, of course, a Hélène, pregnant and fought
over by the local men even as they seem to despise her for her pride and vanity.
