Odyssey

Andreas Litras created this one man-show about 14 years ago with director John Bolton and it has captured hearts from Hobart to the Melbourne Festival, and the world.

Returning to Melbourne as part of the Antipodes Festival, Odyssey is a beautifully realised story about one family's migration from Greece to Australia through the 50s and 60s. Litras tells his parents' story - their life in Greece before their migration, how they met, made the journey and came to terms with life in a new country.

Litras weaves tales from Homer's Odyssey through the play through a second character: a Greek janitor who cheekily takes advantage of his moment on the stage to grab the audience's attention and entertain them with dark and swashbuckling tales from Homer's Odyssey.

The combination of Litras's authentic family history and the old Greek janitor's dramatic storytelling works brilliantly, to the point where an entire culture comes to life on the stage. Odyssey is such a definitive work because it covers so many aspects of the migration experience: the sad farewells, the struggle to learn a new language, the incredible hard work and the painful realisation that the homeland has changed beyond recognition over the years. What is also great is that Litras doesn't sugarcoat his parents’ story, such as in the scene where Andreas and his mum get in the car in the middle of the night to search for wayward dad, who is found gambling at a friend's home.

Litras engages the audience from the start, so that it never feels like you're watching somebody else's life story. It starts to feel like your own. In a recent interview, Litras said that audiences from all sorts of backgrounds felt this way when they saw his show. I went to see it with my husband, whose parents migrated from Italy around the same time as Litras's. He was blown away at how much of his own family story was reflected in Odyssey.

Litras is a terrific performer with a gift for physical comedy and his talents fit so well in Odyssey's structure. One of the best scenes involves a family slideshow that takes an unexpectedly tragic turn, and leads into the janitor's re-telling of Odysseus's trip through the Greek underworld. It is one of the wildest and creepiest things I have seen on stage - and I loved it.

A remarkable work of art, not to be missed.

Sara Bannister