Belt Up Theatre, resident company at York Theatre Royal, came to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with an ambitious project: taking over the attic of the C soco venue and creating an enchanted forest of many rooms, called The House Above, in which to represent their own immersive versions of several myths, tragedies, poems and classics and fairy tales. A total of nine new shows, to be delivered by sixteen partially overlapping actors. Many of these productions were interactive. At least one show, their ‘Octavia’, was family-friendly. All the plays were staged in elaborate settings, with plenty of design details and a refreshing imaginative energy, and a seeping, hard-to-resist enthusiasm. If there already was a buzz around Belt Up, this venture made it twice as loud. But would this extravaganza be able to become more than just that?

For their version of the Odyssey, written by Dominic J Allen, Belt Up used a small, enclosed room, and had three spirited and wiry actors playing all the roles of what they (de)constructed as a play within a play, staged by the actors and by us for the benefit of an American poet from New York, and set in a dystopian future. Which, put in so many words, wouldn’t appear to have much to do with Homer’s work - but yet it did, to a surprisingly deep extent given the short length of the adaptation (only just one hour) and the fact that it started with a young man in a red bathrobe distributing plastic balls to the audience. We were asked to be part of an intervention, to help this confused, desperate and lost American accept the reality of his situation. We were asked to be accessories to a conspiracy, to help the perhaps torturing, perhaps genuinely concerned couple who was leading the game by holding a gas mask filled with sedative, and hiding it from the protagonist. We were asked to play five of the six heads of the monster Scylla, to be convincingly crawling zombies, and to pour two shots of fake blood in the eyes of the bathrobe-clad guy so he could pretend to be Tiresias.

And while we played this game, the breakneck intensity of it all, the exhilaration and the taking part (always managed comfortably and confidently, so it never felt like a member of the audience had been elbowed on stage), never quite suffocated the meaning. By involving us and pushing us, Belt Up wasn’t after a circus, but an investigation and dismemberment of the original text. Do we like Ulysses or not? Is Ulysses the cunning one and the same with Odysseus the wise? What does it mean to come home, or to want to go home, and is any exile really and utterly involuntary? From Calypso to Circe to Penelope, from the descent to Hades to a nightmarish vision of a war that was any war, Allen consistently showed a fortunate relationship with Homer’s text, a love that managed to walk on the brink of reverence and shy veneration. Those who weren’t familiar with the characters of the poem might have missed out on some of the references, and possibly on certain layers of irony, but were still enabled to capture the spirit of this refreshing take on the main man, our man, ourselves and Ulysses.

In the adjoining room, with Alexander Wright’s version of Sophocles’ classical tragedy Antigone, there was quieter intimacy, but far less participation. In the mellow, excruciatingly nostalgic atmosphere of a wealthy garden, with continuous melancholic toasts being proposed by barefoot kids in cocktail attire, Antigone slowly morphed into a love story with a definite deco, Gatsby-ish touch, a Romeo and Juliet for the beautiful and damned. And like with Romeo and Juliet, Antigone’s decision to give sacred burial to her brother, who had been fighting against their city and had therefore become its official enemy, on top of being her suicide also turns into a conflict between generations, at the heart of which are different moral values, a change in emotional metabolism which makes the ones incomprehensible and hostile to the others. Not necessarily what Sophocles had in mind: Antigone and her siblings are Oedipus’s children, which goes a long way to explain the inescapable faults they carry around on their shoulders, and Wright also did away with the political dimension of the text, if understandably so; but interesting nonetheless.

There were songs, as well, which didn’t always seem necessary, accompanied by a piano and guitar that added to the public school feeling, and having taken away the higher and more culturally rooted reasons for Antigone’s insistence, it was at times hard not to find her slightly self-indulgent in her martyrdom. While we were asked to cover her in our contemporary psychology, we would have needed to recognise her ancient one in order to find her properly tragic, rather than simply unlucky and sad. Nevertheless, again thanks to a passionate cast and to a dedication to detail, the scene of Antigone’s death was cleverly staged and beautiful and touching, and redeemed the occasional superficiality of the adaptation.

Ultimately, Belt Up’s ambitious experiment didn’t turn out to be perfect or always on the mark, but it was remarkably close, and remarkably interesting. It will be even more interesting to see how this Edinburgh act will be followed next year.

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