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ODYSSEY

2 performers · IT
Synopsis

A fresh, fun and astonishing Odyssey like you have never imagined it. A hilarious journey into the fantastic world evoked by one of Homer's masterpieces.

Since its debut, the Odyssey has travelled by sea and land beyond the Alps and across Europe. The production has been presented everywhere: in Russia as far as Siberia, in the Baltic states, in Pakistan, Armenia, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, and even in its native land, Greece, winning wide acclaim from critics and audiences everywhere.

This award-winning international theatre company presents the audience with a modern reinterpretation of Homer's epic about Odysseus's adventurous return to Ithaca: his hopes, his weaknesses, his heroic and erotic adventures as he faces and defeats the Sirens, the Cyclops, Polyphemus, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis and the various suitors to his throne. A dazzling performance full of rhythm, movement, imagination and originality, from which emerges an unprecedented portrait of the Achaean hero: intense, ironic, human.

ODYSSEY: Patrizia Barbuiani and Markus Zohner on stage
ODYSSEY, Patrizia Barbuiani, Markus Zohner, Markus Zohner Arts Company
The Performance

Theatre unplugged.

For a theatre company like ours, searching for new theatrical forms, for a fusion of imagination with body, voice and language, performing its productions around the world, the Odyssey is a material as ideal as it could possibly be.

Theatre in its purest form!
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

The fantastic world of gods, demigods and monsters, and among them, tiny yet mighty, Odysseus. Odysseus the cunning, Odysseus the wrathful, Odysseus the endurer: a forerunner of Don Quixote, though less fanciful, and with deadly Scylla and Charybdis as adversaries instead of windmills and wineskins – yet he too is thrown back again and again, seemingly hopeless, a fighter against the undefeatable, against fantastic beings that here are still real.

The most brilliant Performance of the Festival!
The News, Lahore, Pakistan

With him his companions: sailors, brave warriors who blunder into Circe's trap, who would follow the deadly song of the Sirens if their leader did not prevent them by cunning. Men who, briefly unsupervised, finally give in to their hunger and pay for it with their lives.

And finally Odysseus's wife Penelope, his son Telemachus: people of the highest integrity, morality and trust, surrounded by suitors who “laughed with horribly contorted faces and swallowed blood-spattered meat.” Penelope and Telemachus, who hold out with only a few loyal followers and find the knowledge, from somewhere, that Odysseus will return and free them.

Humans so divine, and gods so human.

Extremely unusual at the New York Festival: Standing Ovations
CurtainUp, New York

The world has changed in the thousands of years since Odysseus, yet globalised suitors still cheerfully slaughter the cattle in our own house, television bewitchingly turns us into swine, one-eyed financial giants delight in our visit to their enormous cave.

And the Odyssey goes on…

Gallery
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Cast and Credits
Concept and directionPatrizia Barbuiani, Markus Zohner
PerformersPatrizia Barbuiani, Markus Zohner
CostumesSettima Bonelli, Monica Croci
Set designGiovanni Chiari
DramaturgyDr. Wolfgang Santorini
PhotographyStudio D Team
Production assistantElisabetta Preite
ProductionMarkus Zohner Arts Company
Booking Inquiry

To host ODYSSEY at your theatre, festival or cultural venue, contact the production.

Contact elisabetta@petruska.ch
Production Elisabetta Preite, Associazione artistica PETRUSKA