Every year, our summer run of Artistic Director Richard Spaul’s solo performances adds to the repertoire. In 2025, the addition is Skaree Monstas, and here Richard offers background and insights into his approach.
Richard, let’s start with the title, Skareee Monstas. What’s this telling us about the new production?
Skareee Monstas is an adaptation/translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Or rather a bit of it.
It’s the bit that most people are familiar with, in which Odysseos and his crew are on their way home from Troy and encounter Skareee Monstas – Cyclops, a one-eyed giant; Scylla, a six-headed female man-eater; Charybdis, a consuming whirlpool; The Sirens, strange birds whose beautiful song lure men to their deaths on the rocks.
All these creatures have long been part of literary and popular culture and have fascinated artists and writers for centuries. They embody one of our basic fears – the fear of being eaten.
As you say, Homer’s work is fascinating. But is it really relevant to today’s world?
It absolutely is relevant. Odysseos and his crew, heroised in Boy’s Own stories and in very recent feature films, are little more than marauding pirates. The first thing they do is massacre the inhabitants of a seaside town and steal all their possessions, including the women who live there. That’s all they were doing in Troy in the first place. That’s all they ever do. They steal things. I feel they are the real ‘Skareee Monstas’.
I hope the audience may be aware of an irony here. We of the twenty-first century live in dangerous times, when massacres and robbery are as common as they were in Homer’s world and are justified in all sorts of appalling ways, whether by nation states facing ‘existential threats’ or ‘terrorist’ organisations.
Our world is a world of Skareee Monstas and Homer speaks loudly and eloquently about it. I hope to bring out these themes in my translation and performance.
As you’ve said, Homer’s work is originally not only in Greek, but ancient Greek. So where does the text you’re using come from?
It’s from Homer’s Odyssey and the bit I’m doing is the story that Odysseos tells when he is a guest in Phaeacia,following one of his many shipwrecks. He describes what happens after leaving Troy and his thwarted efforts to get back home to Ithaka, the dangers encountered and the eventual loss of all his ships and crew.
I’ve myself developed the performance text. I’ve used the original Greek, but I’ve also referenced bak to previous translations, notably that of both George Chapman, who produced the first English translation in 1615 and of Alexander Pope, about 100 years later. These translators are literary giants, the greatest poets of their times.
I wanted to refer back to these early translators because in more recent times Homeric translations have on the whole been produced, not by real poets, but by classicists obsessed by textbook accuracy. As a result the text has become blander and blander.
So I’ve tried to create a translation which gets close to the weird fascination, violence and music of the original text, and have found inspiration in great early translators such as Chapman and Pope.
You’ve told other tales over the past several years in your solo performances, always to audience acclaim. Why do you think storytelling performances are so popular and compelling?
The last 10 years of my work have been an amazing journey into the world of solo performance, especially storytelling. What I like about it, and I think many people respond to is its unmediated nature.
There’s no spectacle, no technology, no effects. It’s just me and the audience. And between us – between my focused performing and the audience’s focused attention – we make a highly-charged atmosphere
We don’t know exactly what the ‘rhapsodes’ (bards) did in Ancient Greece when they recited these great epics in a world without written language, but I like to think it may have been quite similar to these solo performances. There’s a very strong sense of a ‘gathering’ to create and witness something unique, something which is not a commodity.
Your performance is very dark – the Monstas in the title are indeed Skareee. What’s the attraction of such terrifying material that’s made it popular from ancient times to now?
If it’s dark, if it deals with difficult, violent, unsettling things, then it speaks to us about the world we really live in and the problems we face in being human in an in human world.
There’s no real point in doing anything else. What is there to say about the innocuous, the harmless, the safe and the unproblematic?
One of the very noticeable things about all your solo performances is your use of Voice to create atmosphere. Can you tell us. more about your interest in that?
The Voice is one of my main interests as a teacher, actor and singer and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with several brilliant voice practitioners over many years.
Conventional acting has quite a narrow range when it comes to the Voice – the human voice can do way more than it usually does in mainstream theatre, music and cinema. So I’ve long been committed to an exploration of its possibilities and some of them will be on show in my current performances.
The Voice is integral to Odyssey. It’s sometimes terrifying – Cyclops’ monster voice, the screams of men being eaten by Scylla. It’s sometimes beautiful but dangerous – the Sirens’ song lures men to their death, Circe’s voice is ‘past earthly thought’ – but she turns men into pigs. And the poetry itself is musical – somewhere between speech and song.
Christopher Logue, in his preface to War Music – his brilliant adaptation of Homer’s Iliad – says ‘The world of Homer isn’t humanistic. It’s musical.’ So music, voice, song are all vital aspects of both translation and performance.
What are the main messages… insights… experiences that you hope audiences will take away from Skareee Monstas?
I hope people enjoy it. Everyone will take away something different, I would imagine. I hope people feel they’ve encountered one of the world’s great epics. I hope they feel contact with Homer’s strange world, unfathomably distant but at the same time, paradoxically, right up close. I hope they feel that the work addresses difficult and important issues that we’re all facing in today’s violent and rapacious world. I hope
they remember it for more than a couple of hours afterwards.
One final thing. Some audience members may well have not only enjoyed your performance, but want to get involved directly with in situ:’s work. How can they do that?
We run regular courses throughout the year, often leading to performances for the
public.
This year we’ve been working on The Voice and will continue to do so next year, starting in October. We have very experienced and dedicated performers with whom I have been working for years, but new people are always joining us and of course our future depends on that.
So if you’re reading this and are inspired to want to do it yourself, please join us.
