The Iliad

Currently on at the Lyceum Theatre. It's not something that I or J is over-familiar with, but this production catered for the likes of us, making it clear who was on which side in each scene. There was quite a lot of humour, mostly coming from the gods, which may not be in the original, but I thought it worked well and provided some relief from the parlous state that the Greeks and Trojans found themselves in, caused either by the other side or their own. I would highly recommend it.

I bought a programme, which I regard as an extravagence and don't normally splash out on, but it did have an interesting article by Owen Dudley-Edwards from which I learnt that Homer probably didn't actually write the Iliad, instead he performed it - all characters. And it dates from the eighth century BC.