Night Journey, by Martin Jones and Gregory Light, is currently playing at the Arts and Letters Club as part of the Fringe. An elderly professor is teaching a class on interpreting Homer’s Odyssey to four students in a basement storage room. All five are facing their own demons and are in the class for varied reasons. Slowly, despite pedagogy as ancient as the text, they find a way of finding meaning in the Odyssey, or at least in the actions of Odysseus, and begin to confront their own demons. So far so good.

The problem is that “right seeing” and “right doing” are seen almost entirely from Odysseus’ point of view. Telemachus gets a look in but there’s no perspective for Penelope which, since half the class is female, is a strange way of looking at the world. Needless to say Odysseus’ slaughter of the slave girls doesn’t get a mention. Perhaps I’m being too picky but it does seem ironic that in a show that is about the contemporary relevance of the Odyssey what we hear is snippets of incredibly traditional male-centric interpretation.

It’s also dramatically clunky. The ending is contrived around a more or less illiterate MAGA podcaster auditing a class and the entire university administration panicking at her banal sloganising about teaching “critical thinking”. If university administrations (and to be fair this seems like a third rate at best US university) really behave like that we might as well close the lot. It’s also weirdly structured. There are numerous very short scenes with little continuity and too often characters address monologues to the audience. It doesn’t come over as well crafted and Gregory Light’s direction does little to paper over the cracks.

The cast is pretty good though. The most interesting character is Joan (Caroline Barr Ritchie) who convinces as a mature student who has lost a son in Afghanistan. She’s paired with a younger orphan Ash (Brynn Bonne) who has and is a victim of domestic violence. The relationship between the two is nuanced and convincing which makes the failure to consider a feminine perspective in the text all the more puzzling. Ozzie (Fred Kuhr) is an ex-con who discovers that he can facilitate complex conversations and who forms a believable relation with Joan. The fourth student Paul (Erik Bracciodieta) is a trust fund kid with a ten ton chip on his shoulder. One wonders what he is doing at such a crappy university. He’s also the one who introduces MagaMama Carla (Renée Stein) to the scene. To be fair to her she does her best with a cardboard cutout. Finally Thomas Gough is quite believable as the antediluvian professor, Zuke. I don’t know whether there really are Zukes anymore. They were rare when I was at uni 60 years ago! But in any event his transition from droning bore to somewhat engaged facilitator is pretty effective.

Night Journey could, and maybe should, be much more compelling than it is. It plays at the Arts and letters Club until July 12th.

Photo credits: Sara Jade Alfaro-Dehghani