LET’S START AT the very beginning. And let’s take a text that was penned in the 8th or 9th century before the Christian era, by a bloke named Homer. The context – bloodshed, mayhem and men killing one another for the sake of loyalty, vanity and patriotism – is universal and ubiquitous. The dates and details, not so much. Alan Committie takes the helm in An Iliad, a work premised loosely on the great classic epic. It performs at the Flipside, Baxter Theatre, until 14 March 2026.

From the outset, it’s a very ambitious initiative. We don’t study Homer at school as we do, Shakespeare. It is, of course, not the original text, but what we hear is not only unfamiliar to most, but also riddled with the kind of detail that you find in the Bible. And handled with a scant sense of nuance, replete with declaratives and Sturm und Drang in the lighting department, the work teeters on the edge of seriously soporific.

Only the context is uncomfortably precious. With seating arranged on the theatre’s stage, you’re sitting thigh to thigh with a stranger: the chairs sit closer to one another than permanent theatre seats do. There are no arm rests. The heat is significant. The show assaults your senses, with all the tricks in the book from strobe effects that make the performer’s shadow glimmer and sizzle gigantically on the wall, to lights that shine punitively into the audience’s face. And there’s a great sense of sacredness in the enthusiastic full house. This is Alan Committie, and audiences adore him.

Within the first twenty minutes, the out of place guffaws from audience members expecting a Committie-esque laugh at every nuance, dries up. The work is dense historically and there are not enough handles to hold on to. Yes, there are references to the universal soldier: the proverbial cannon fodder in ancient Greece who are easily translatable into any young man you know. There is a list of wars which feels like an AI search – wars oft named controversially for the victor. There are little asides to make you giggle, but they’re forced: And there are moments when you’re not sure if the “I” in the text reflects on Homer, the poet, or Committie himself.

The work is too long by half and feels relentless in the business of killing Hector, or seeing Achilles vindicated. The text is penned by people much younger than Homer himself, and the effect of it is a flattening of the old narratives, and a simplifying of them into platitudes of anger and gestures of bashing up guys perceived to be worthy of a good bashing up, or better still, a violent death and a parade of their bodies around the city. You’re not given to understand the pernickety details of why these deaths happen, but you’re offered a platter of Greek gods and their idiosyncrasies, whether you like it or not.

On a level, this production feels mischievous. It feels like the full houses and the standing ovations are brought on by a sense of loyalty to the man himself, dearly beloved onstage for his stand-up comedy work by tens of thousands, rather than anything to do with the current work itself. The fans queue in their enthusiastic masses, but when the doors are closed and the lights go up, jokes are scant on this menu and the depth of focus is too big and yet too small.  

An Iliad is written by Lisa Peterson and David O’Hare, directed by Geoffrey Hyland assisted by Tailyn Ramsamy and produced by Gloucester Productions. It features creative input by Charl Johan Lingenfelder (live sound and soundscape), Luke Ellenbogen (lighting), Michaeline Wessels (costumes) and Sylvaine Strike (movement consultant). It is performed by Alan Committie, and performs at the Flipside, Baxter Theatre Centre, in Rondebosch, Cape Town, until 14 March 2026.