Only a talent as prodigious as that of Derek Walcott (who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature) should attempt a project as ambitious as rendering Homer's Odyssey into a stage version. Walcott's lifelong immersion in Greek and Latin literary classics, his continual borrowing and interweaving of classical references and themes in his poetry, and his own Odyssean epic poem Omeros, published in 1990, have eminently prepared him for [Odyssey,] this most current work. Some pragmatists might argue well that a staged version of this play made from an epic would be doomed because of the large and unwieldy number of characters and sets employed; yet I would maintain that Walcott's new effort, as a work of literature to be read, is a brilliant success.

True to his profound respect for the ancient Greek classics, Walcott has taken Homer's epic at face value, with its characters, episodes, themes, structure, ethos, and emotional nuances, and “translated” it, with astounding faithfulness to the original. Still, crusty Aristotle would complain, stating that “the poets who have dramatised the sole story of the Fall of Troy … either fail utterly or meet with poor success on the stage” (Poetics, 18.5, S. H. Butcher, tr.). His reasoning, quite simply, was that the plethora of episodes and the multiplicity of plots characteristic of the Iliad and the Odyssey do not lend themselves to the relatively stark, concentrated form of the tragedy. Aeschylus and Euripides succeeded precisely because they dramatized only a select part of the vaster epics. Walcott challenges these cultural monuments while deferring to their sovereignty and wisdom; he may well fall nobly with Aristotle's lance in his side—the numerous exotic episodes and characters that populate Odysseus' journeys would be extremely cumbersome on the stage—but he rises into sublime lyricism with his brilliant poetry and drama on the page.

Walcott's faithfulness to the original has almost a scholarly accuracy: he begins his play with a prelude from blind Billy Blue, a double for the voice of Homer himself, then introduces, for purposes of exposition and setting, the major Greek heroes at the end of the Trojan War discussing the dispensation of dead Achilles' shield (which Odysseus won, but with the curse of wandering ten years before ever reaching home). Next, the sorrowful scene in Ithaca unfolds, as in Homer's original, with Telemachus barely escaping the predatory suitors and going in search of news of his father, first reaching Nestor and later Menelaus. The scene then switches to Odysseus and his beleaguered sailors, when his helmsman Elpenor drowns; he meets the charming young maiden Nausicaa and takes part in the contests on her island. The terrible encounter with the Cyclops ensues, followed by that with the witch Circe and her enrapturing magical potions, resulting in Odysseus' vision of the underworld and of the spirits of his dead mother and other Greek heroes. Closer to his home, Odysseus struggles through brief encounters with the deadly, beckoning Sirens and the clashing rocks of Scylla and Charybdis. The final scenes of his homecoming also follow his ancient model closely: meetings with his shepherd Eumaeus, his old nurse Eurycleia, then Telemachus and Penelope and their gradual recognitions. Walcott's scene of the slaying of the suitors could well have been written by Aeschylus or Sophocles, albeit behind a screen, as was the ancient tragedians' custom with violence.

Such meticulous fidelity on the part of a modern playwright indicates, I would judge, Walcott's desire to introduce new and often woefully untutored young audiences to the grandeur and excitement of ancient Greek literature. He not only incorporates the majority of essential episodes from Homer's Odyssey but also makes appropriate, modest use of heroic language as spoken by these famous figures from Greek tradition and holds resolutely to the Greek tragic technique of stichomythia, alternating single lines of dialogue. The latter functions well in allowing the frequent use of maxims, in which Walcott excels, and it moves the action and pace of the drama along forcefully. When Walcott retreats from his high-toned diction, he reverts to standard, common English speech and occasionally, with a humorous twist, to Caribbean dialect in the mouths of the Ithacan servants. This last, I think, is a comic bone thrown to his own homeland, St. Lucia. As nearly always in Walcott's work, the poetic strength of his sharp images and well-drawn phrases sparkles and triumphs.