A plain wooden table and chair, centre stage, and white dropcloths covering furniture pieces in the background. Lights up on the empty set with a bit of fog. A slow shuffle thump stage right.

A weary man on crutches (Michael Peng) hobbling in, looking at the audience, and commenting that he’s been reciting this poem, telling this story, many times, in different formats and in different places. He has a version that takes a year to tell, and a version that takes three days. Some places people love it, and sometimes the audiences are weary of it. He’s wearing ordinary, 20th- or 21st-century clothing, but the places he names might be in the ancient world. I wasn’t familiar with the details of the source material, so at first I wondered if he might be representing one of the characters – maybe the Greek warrior Achilles if he survived the war, maybe the Trojan non-combatant Paris. The limp, the exhaustion, the wooden crutches and contemporary walking-boot – those all made sense to me evoking a former soldier. But eventually I figured out that as narrator, he’s representing the canonical poet Homer.

After a little while, he stops pacing, sits at the table, and starts to sing or chant in what I’m pretty sure was Ancient Greek, with a poetic metre. I guessed that it was the start of Homer’s original verse,

“Achilles’ baneful wrath resound, O Goddess, that imposed
Infinite sorrows on the Greeks, and many brave souls losed
From breasts heroic, sent them far to that invisible cave
That no light comforts, and their limbs to dogs and vultures gave;”

And then the poet launches into the story, in English and in casual prose, of a few crucial days after ten years of war. He switches viewpoints between the Greeks on the beach, with King Agamemnon, and Greek warrior Achilles and his companion Patroclus, and the Trojan royal family in their walled city, including monarchs Priam and Hecuba, their soldier son Hector, and his brother Paris, the one who started the war by eloping with (kidnapping? seducing?) Helen, who had been married to King Menelaus of Sparta at the time. I recognized all these names, because of various other versions of the source material, but the poet gave enough information to refresh my memory about who was on which side and why.

The characters and events are rich source material, used in Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, several of Charles Mee’s plays, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novel The Firebrand, Madeline Miller’s 2011 novel The Song of Achilles, Jessy Ardern’s plays Prophecy and The Fall of the House of Atreus: A Cowboy Love Song, and many other plays, novels, songs, poems, and movies. In any versions, it’s always struck me as a big messy epic, hard to follow without conventional plot arc and harder to find a satisfying theme.

The version in Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s solo play that is built on the Varscona stage in this Shadow Theatre production (John Hudson directing) is surprisingly compelling. By giving us viewpoints from both armies, the playwrights don’t give us the option of dehumanizing one side and looking to rejoice with the others as “winners”. There is pride and revenge and anger and stubbornness on both sides. And there are gods and goddesses who take sides and make things worse, for their own motives. And there are horrific losses and betrayals. The script of An Iliad isn’t a selection of the source material that gives much agency or attention to female characters, focusing mainly on Achilles and Hector as well as kings and deities.

Partway through, I began thinking about ways that the back-and-forth, endless combat with no hope for peaceful resolution reminded me of more recent conflicts. Gaza. Ukraine. Minneapolis. And then later on in the play, the poet narrator appears almost overcome with the tragedy of the story he’s telling, and then he gets muddled. Oh wait, was that the Peloponnesian war, he corrects himself. Or the second battle of Sparta? He begins naming a few conflicts I’d never heard of, and then others I had, and he keeps going and going and going, to the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the twentieth, wars I’d heard of and wars I never had. And I found myself holding my breath – would he name the horrific conflicts of the New World, and the ones I’d encountered in LIFE Magazine and on TV news? He did name them, and he kept going, his rage and devastation building, repetition driving home that modern wars aren’t one-and-done either, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, Darfur, Sudan, Afghanistan, Gaza, Sudan, Gaza … It was brilliant and horrible.

Despite the fact that the solo narrator spends much of the 105-minute performance sitting down at a table, I found it fascinating to watch and listen to. Musician and sound designer Erik Mortimer accompanies the poem from on stage with a keyboard, a lyre, and various other percussion instruments and looping apparatus. Set and lighting designer Scott Peters enhances the performance with interesting lighting shifts, lights on a backdrop/cyclorama thing evoking sunrise, a shield, and other outlooks with a base set in a sort of timeless pub, with stocked bar, stools, and a pool table. John Hudson, outgoing artistic director of Shadow Theatre, directed the piece, and Leona Brausen provided costuming. Effective use is made of a scarf in the poet embodying different characters. One of my favourite bits of stage business was the part where Achilles and the other Greek leaders are making plans, wielding the sceptre of power – which the poet explains is “like the original talking-stick, in this cradle of democracy” – and Peng naturally hoists a crutch above his head to represent the sceptre.

I learned from members of the production team that Michael Peng’s crutches and walking splint were a recent and necessary addition, due to an ankle injury late in the rehearsal process, and that the original blocking would have had him moving about the stage, standing on the pool table, jumping over the bar, and leaning on the piano. While I would have liked to experience that version, the less mobile narrator contributed to the sense of fatigue and despair and futility.

An Iliad continues at Varscona Theatre until February 8th. Tickets are available here. Matinees offer Pay What You Can pricing at the door.

The 2026 theatre season continues after this with the Citadel’s Death of a Salesman, Walterdale’s production of the Hannah Moskovitch play This is War, Workshop West Playwrights’ Theatre’s My Testimonial (Greg MacArthur), and more.