I guess it is somewhat natural, but everyone is talking about The Odyssey nowadays. I haven't booked a ticket yet to see Nolan's Odyssey yet, but I will fairly soon. Interestingly, Market Square is showing it, but I want to try to see it at an IMAX theatre, at the very least, though I am not going to fly to Regina or wherever to see it in Super IMAX. There are even podcasts dedicated to the Odyssey this summer (Secret Life of Books Eps. 154-158, in particular), as well as plenty of articles talking about what Nolan left out (the bed riddle and almost all of the sex with Circe and especially Calypso) or added, most notably the ending. There are in fact some scraps of legends talking about what happened to Odysseus post-Ithaca, so it isn't as if this ending was completely tacked on, but it certainly isn't what is in the Odyssey itself. His final voyage is discussed in passing in Dante and is actually the focus of Tennyson's Ulysses. I suspect I will overall enjoy it, though I've heard parts are extra loud and then there are long stretches with people whispering. I honestly wonder why no one can seem to convince him that his audience would actually grow more if he didn't tinker with the sound balance so much. I will not go to see Tenet again for this very reason...
I'm debating rereading The Odyssey or at least large chunks of it before I go off to the movie, along with many, many others. (There is even a piece on how bookstores can't keep up with demand for The Odyssey, The Iliad and other classics (paywalled unfortunately).) I recall that back in 2019 I read the Fitzgerald and Lattimore translations of both The Iliad and The Odyssey back to back, coming down firmly in favour of Lattimore, and fortunately I still have my copies of Lattimore's Homer. I've only read a very few snatches of the Wilson and Mendelsohn translations. I'll dig a bit deeper, but am almost certain I will come back to Lattimore as the best translation for what I am looking for in Homer. (As a bit of a follow-up to this post, I did end up getting Musa's Portable Dante, and I really ought to read that fairly soon, alternating with Ciardi's translations. I even have Longfellow's translation of Dante! I don't think anyone finds that a particularly good translation, but it has all of Dore's illustrations, which makes it worth perusing as well.)
Interestingly, Mendelsohn has a memoir or fictionalized memoir (An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic) about his father sitting in on his class about the Odyssey and their bonds growing stronger through exploring the text. This sort of sounds like what Night Journey at this year's Toronto Fringe was going for, though it was ultimate pretty disappointing.
I had high hopes for this, but they were dashed. It's hard to say just what went wrong, though pretty much every critic agreed that the social media influencer who comes in at the very end and tries to stir up trouble was a huge mis-step. This wasn't even remotely believable. I would say that it suffers the most from the playwright not actually writing about anything he knows about personally (academic politics) so filled in the gaps from what he pulled from diverse headlines over the years. It wasn't really clear whether this was all taking place at a university or a college (which in Canada are basically community colleges).
The professor clearly operates as if he is in a classics department in a university, and the rich heir would never be sent to a college (his character was not remotely believable, which was another major problem). However, the bizarre under-resourcing, the other three students and the way that the board of regents tried to bend over backwards to pacify a loony social media agitator all reek of college. Aside from the complete lack of insight into how the college politics would play out, the play just didn't dive into the poem itself enough and show how wrestling with the thorny issues in the poem changed the students' lives. Most of the character growth (generally not believable) came through interactions that had nothing to do with the source material itself. And the staging was just ridiculous with so many short, unlinked scenes, making this drag on for too long. So this really requires a complete rethinking and rewriting. It was such a missed opportunity.
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