Homeric levels of misery: Paradise, at the Olivier Theatre, reviewed

The National Theatre has given Sophocles’s Philoctetes a makeover and a new title, Paradise. This must be ironic because the location is hell on earth. The action starts in a dirt circle sprawling with smashed military gear where a group of plump female vagrants are waking up in a clutch of filthy old tents. They’re living on a Caribbean island which also houses a prison for migrants.

In a nearby cave dwells an exiled Homeric archer, Philoctetes, who survives by eating squirrels which he kills with his handmade bow. A committed anti-vegan, Philoctetes shuns the plentiful rice, garlic and mangos that grow naturally in the tropics. Enter two British soldiers in contemporary battle fatigues, who want to track Philoctetes down. The Brits are called Odysseus and Neoptolemus.

It’s clear at this stage that the play wants to straddle the gulf of 28 centuries between our age and the Homeric era. And the location seems to flit between the Caribbean and the Med. It’s quite a brain-scrambler. The British soldiers are keen for Philoctetes to return to battle and help defeat the Trojans with his all-conquering bow. What they don’t explain is how a modern war can be won with arrows fired by a single archer, even if he is the Olympic champion.

Philoctetes refuses to go to Troy but he doesn’t want to go ‘home’ either. Where’s home? Not Troy or Greece but a ‘land of hope and glory’, which he despises because it cultivates ‘rampant oppression based on skin colour’. Neoptolemus reminds Philoctetes that his son is keen to see him again but even the prospect of a family reunion elicits a toxic snarl. ‘My son,’ rasps the great archer, ‘was born dead like the rest of us.’