ODIE Review by Rosana Bouzas

Ancient tales are often modernised to speak to contemporary anxieties. It’s nothing new, but the best adaptations always understand what makes the original story endure. Emrys Quin’s ODIE proves the point brilliantly. By translating Homer’s concerns around honour and identity into the language and rituals of Australian masculinity, Quin reveals how the quintessential Aussie bloke is no more than a mythologised ideal.

In a fast-paced, one-hour verse monologue, Quin maps Odie’s journey through the codes of Australian male culture: footy, boozing, partying, and gambling with your mates. Armed with little more than a plastic crate and a beer-soaked maroon NRL jersey, his highly physical performance is dynamic and very funny. But ODIE is much more than The Odyssey with footy jokes. By reimagining the warrior culture at the heart of Homer’s world into modern Australian sports hooliganism, Quin astutely presents us with men who readily accept aggression and tribal loyalty, along with excessive drinking, partying, and gambling as part of the code that signals they are ‘one of the boys’. What Odie’s journey gradually exposes is how easily those accepted markers of masculinity tip into brutality, prejudice, complicity, and self-destruction.

At first, Odie appears to embody the code perfectly. Draped in Queensland maroon, beer in hand, physically fearless, and fiercely loyal to his mates, he is a “legend”: a good-natured larrikin, always ready for another round and never inclined to make too much of anything. Yet with each encounter along his ill-fated journey, another familiar marker of Australian masculinity begins to look less harmless and more grotesque.

The unravelling begins almost immediately, as a State of Origin match turns into a Trojan War. Players are cast as gods and Odie and his mates revel in a bit of  “biffo” as the violence spills off the field. Quin continues to cleverly reframe episodes of The Odyssey into Odie’s desperate attempt to return home to his missus, Penny, who is waiting for him at the Ithaca Suites to celebrate their one-year anniversary. The dangers of the Lotus-eaters turns into a boozy detour on a boat, while the Cyclops and his cave become a one-eyed bouncer at a rave, and Circe’s pigs appear as thuggish NRL powerbrokers, greedy and casually racist. Even Odie disguising himself as a woman to evade the Cyclops gives the iconic “Nobody” ruse a new edge, suggesting femininity and masculinity are both roles to be performed.

Quin has fun with all the parallels but they keep forcing Odie to face the ugliness that sits beneath the stories that he and his mates tell about themselves. He witnesses violence, prejudice, addiction, and obvious desperation, and still hesitates to act or call it out. So much so, that by the time he utters the all-too-familiar “she’ll be right”, it sounds like nothing more than a lame excuse.

As doubt begins to creep in, Odie is forced to confront the reality of who he is. While Homer’s Odysseus must eventually shed the outward signs of his kingship – his name, status, appearance, and physical prowess – before his true worth can be recognised, Quin turns this idea in a darker direction for Odie. His jersey, group of mates, drinking rituals, and larrikin swagger begin as proof that he belongs, but increasingly, they begin to look like props holding together an identity with very little substance. Penny, meanwhile, remains the safe haven he is trying to reach. Though the closer he gets to her, the clearer it becomes that Odie, a man in crisis, is on the brink of imploding.

What makes ODIE hit so hard is Quin’s physically demanding performance. His use of gesture gives the ideas he presents flesh and weight, while his impressive use of verse lends the piece urgency and pace. Like the call of Homer’s Sirens, Quin’s onstage presence is simply mesmerising. His comic timing is so precise it keeps the laughs turning until the things that made us laugh begin to look less harmless, and what starts as a rowdy Australian spin on Homer, ends somewhere far darker than Odie’s spilled can of XXXX suggests.

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Rosana Bouzas attended ODIE at Erskineville Town Hall on Thursday 17 September.