Philoctetes

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

THE set – a toppling Greek column amid various rocks and boulders – hints at ancient days but the men’s clothes are modern linens. What of the text? In Benny Young’s adaptation it hovers between past and present with the simmering debate between honour and expediency edging into current spin tactics (tinged with ironic asides of a political hue) before re-connecting with Socrates’ loftily-expressed ideals of what it means to be a Greek.

In keeping with this Sol Summer Season Of Classic Cuts, Young has distilled the original cast to just three characters: the wily Odysseus, the noble but naive youth, Neoptolemos, and Philoctetes – marooned by Odysseus on barren Lemnos because of a festering wound that would not heal. It still oozes stinking pus, so why have the others come to visit?

Philoctetes (played with carnaptious hurt by Young) has Heracles’s magic bow ... the bow that would, in his hands, win the war for Greece. Smart-suited but unworldly Neoptolemos (Daniel Portman) is the morally upright stooge who must, even at the expense of his own integrity, dupe Philoctetes into joining forces with those who abandoned him years before.

Young has, however, tweaked the original narrative, taking the emphasis off Neoptolemos’s crisis of conscience – here, for all his misgivings he holds onto the bow! – to sharpen the duplicity exercised by an Odysseus who has only one goal: victory. Eat your heart out Machiavelli!

George Docherty’s guilt-free schemer is ahead of every game. Avuncular when schmoozing Neoptolemos into tricking Philoctetes, steely when it seems his plans might fail, Docherty is also Young’s bridge between yesterday’s legends and today’s reality. The droll but shrewd analysis of diplomacy, outwitting the enemy and the value of cheating has a whiff of Greece’s ongoing contretemps with its creditors.