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Memorial review – Alice Oswald's exquisite elegy to Iliad's lost mortals

Barbican, London
Helen Morse and a 200-strong chorus give a majestic ode to the everyday people whose stories are buried within Homer’s epic

Alice Oswald’s 2011 poem, an excavation of Homer’s Iliad, focuses not on its gods and heroes but on the 215 ordinary mortals – tradesmen, shepherds, everymen – whose little-known names are contained within the ancient epic.

In this luminous staging of Oswald’s work, they are represented by a 200-strong chorus that roves the stage and appears like a sea of humanity: men, women and children in modern dress, raised from the dead, it seems, as their stories are told. Their choreographed presence is a spectacle from the first scene, set amid the aftermath of the fall of Troy, in which a lone man raises a hand in a barren battlefield. The ground begins to move and reveals itself to be a swathe of bodies, turning, rising, coming back to life.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IrUCl1
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