Odysseus, Verbrecher

It is based on an episode toward the end of Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus returns to his kingdom and slaughters his wife's suitors, who are called reformers in the play.

The six playwrights were Grzegorz Jarzyna [de; pl; sv], Péter Nádas, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Christoph Ransmayr, Roland Schimmelpfennig and Enda Walsh.

As three shepherds play a game, the situation on the island is revealed to the audience: power has been usurped by a group of reformers who, led by Antinous, also are suitors of Odysseus' wife, Penelope.

He tells Telemachus he plans to enter the court disguised and talk sense into the reformers, convinced that his name will be enough to restore order and that his return will be a feast for everybody.

[4] The first Austrian production was at the Schauspielhaus Salzburg and premiered on 19 March 2015, directed by Robert Pienz and starring Harald Fröhlich as Odysseus.

[7] Die Presse's Eva Pfister says the masks from the original production were sometimes awkward, but occasionally provided a sense of something ancient, summarising the play as "a clear, sometimes preachy accusation against warmongers who turn a blind eye to the consequences of their actions".

[4] Reviewing Schauspielhaus Salzburg's production, Gerhard Dorfi of Der Standard says the staging and cast managed to ground the myth by using allusions to contemporary Greece, such as how one of the reformers wore a Syriza shirt, but that messages about how "new brooms don't sweep any better than the old ones" can be a bit flat.

[6] According to the scholar Stephanie Jug, the play deals with a utopian conception of the home, prevalent in the cultural history of the German word Heimat.