The Odyssey / Mark Bruce Company, dance review: Surreal epic with a Tarantino twist

After a couple of decades on the fringes of the dance world, choreographer Mark Bruce scored a hit in 2013 with the award-winning Dracula. The Odyssey is his follow-up, another literary reimagining laced with haze-heavy atmosphere and blood-soaked rock’n’roll.

Key to getting Bruce’s work is the music — he writes much of it and the rest comes from the likes of Sonic Youth and Mark Lanegan, segueing into Mozart and Scarlatti; dingy, bluesy guitars dissolving into heavenly transcendence. In the attention to soundtrack he’s like the Quentin Tarantino of contemporary dance. In the stylised femme fatales and heavy bodycount too.

The mood is grungy, sometimes tongue-in-cheek. Bruce takes surreal detours with the story, painting the Cyclops as a pervy drunken Santa and Calypso a lonely waitress, left with Odysseus’ baby as he voyages off into the path of storms and Sirens.

But this isn’t really Odysseus’ story — much juicier are the sadistic gods using him as their plaything, Christopher Akrill (replacing an injured Jonathan Goddard) and Eleanor Duval, pulling strings like some sinister (but sexy) Keyser Söze. Thus we’re lacking the drive of human emotions. Odysseus (Christopher Tandy) is your generic hero, good at knifing and brooding. It’s Hannah Kidd as wife Penelope who brings emotional wallop in even fleeting moments of dance, and gives you a sense of why it’s worth making that epic journey home.

Until March 19, Wilton's Music Hall (020 7702 2789, wiltons.org.uk)

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