Two Cents: Odie (Sydney Fringe)
Earlier this year, before the Chris Nolan film dropped, I saw my first Homer epic adapted to the stage, An Iliad with the Sydney Theatre Company. With a careworn David Wenham pacing the wharf’s wooden boards as an immortal poet, this one-man act (accompanied by cellist Helen Svoboda) was solemn, visionary, resonant. If a little soporific at times – a heavy gravitas to its golden lustre – it was incredible, and I don’t regret the $110 ticket. I say this as someone for whom 70% of income goes to paying rent, too. “We’ll be talking about this play for years to come,” prophesied John Shand for the Sydney Morning Herald in his five-star review.
Emrys Quin’s Odie, in Erskineville’s poky little grey-carpeted Boom Boom Room for Sydney Fringe, scores higher in originality, writing and subversive storytelling clout. When its hour had run, the small sold-out crowd erupted, then sat there spellbound for a few more moments, gawping at each other’s gobsmacked faces, grinning and dazed. I’m still shaking my head. This is why we roll the dice at Fringe.
Billed as “a one man black comedy epic for the discerning modern hooligan”, Odie is an excoriating, vivid and viciously surreal interrogation of the Aussie ‘legend’ – that lionised low-life, forged in battler myths and brutish bonds, who is himself tragically condemned. In keeping with the ancient ways, before Hollywood CGI and the forced hyperstimulation chug, the story is told through just one man, Quin – sinewy in a sports jersey and a bowl-cut straw mullet, alive as flames dancing on a goon-dark billabong. Running the coarse vernacular of the vaunted larrikin through a free-wheeling rhyme (inspired by Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe, I’m told), Quin ingeniously maps the travails of Odysseus and his men to Odie and his motley degenerate crew, spinning a sublime, hilarious and savage verse with a soupçon of comic doggerel flung in the mix.
Tipping the age-old story upside down into an Antipodean modern-day mythic, Odysseus’s embattled journey home from war to Penelope is now Odie’s, a visiting Queenslander to Sydney. It begins in the cut-throat battleground of the State of Origin finals in Olympic Park, with its warring tribes of Blue vs Maroon. Odie’s north star is his girlfriend Penny, waiting for him in the Ithaca suite atop the glittering Crown Casino, where they’d planned to celebrate their anniversary. But when he comes to after a stadium clash concussion, it’s 1am, and there’s no trains running.
The way home becomes a late-night hellscape ruled by creatures of the city’s greed-bloated underbelly – strange and grotesque and fantastical. Those familiar with Homer’s OG text will recognise them in their new incarnations: the two prawns as the sentinels of a yacht with a charmed mural and limitless supplies of booze and blow; the one-eyed bouncer at a nightclub called The Cave; the treacherous siren call of the slot machines song.
Are these all side quests really necessary though, let alone ‘noble’? Skilfully, slyly, and with sharp spitting humour that bleeds unexpectedly into the profound, Quin’s rendition begins to peel these grand exploits back as grubby entitlements – shabby excuses to dilly-dally, deny and delay Odie’s toughest challenge yet: to be a good bloke and decent partner. “Empathy is like a pipe of lead,’ he reflects; “helps you get into someone else's head.” What is it, after all, that makes him more blindly loyal to his toxic mates than to his long-suffering missus? As his boys (and one sheila) succumb to their vices, Odie is increasingly – and literally – at war with himself, with four body parts ventriloquised as a blood-hungry fist, a stimulant-seeking spine, a truth-telling gut, and a pleasure-thirsty tongue.
It’s a kind of sorcery, what a master storyteller such as Quin can do. Scudding about the tiny stage under Emily Farrell’s direction with just one plastic crate as a prop, every gesture, every movement, every coarse-tongued high lyric lands and transports. I can see those scenes he summoned, too, clear as day: the pig lord in the VIP lounge getting his tits sucked by suits; ‘Mikey the Bikey’ gushing blood from a biro pen stab wound in his neck; the racist ass-licker drowning in a lake of chunder; Odie in undercover drag getting scooped out to safety by his Maori sporting champ. Also, memorably: the kid at the top of the Crown watching Odie come apart. Though these phantoms aren’t real, hearing becomes seeing, and your eyes grow wider and wider in hallucinatory wonder. It’s like a true, glorious, bump of something clean to a hard-craving imagination.
Absolute artistry, poetry in lurid motion, Odie is a cutting-edge coup, a war cry to a new way in which boys can become men. I’m not a fan of dishing stars here on Two Cents, but I’m giving this one five.
★★★★★
Odie by Emrys Quin
Sydney Fringe
Until 26 September 2026
You’ll like this if you enjoyed: Wake in Fright (1971 film), Host City by David Kelly (2024 novel), The Odyssey (the text, but sure, the film too).
