Review: An Iliad, riveting with the superlative Alan Committie as eternal roving storyteller

What: An Iliad by Lisa Peterson and David O’ Hare Performed by: Alan Committie as The Poet, with Charl Johan Lingenfelder as The Muse When: February 25 to March 14, 2026 Where: Baxter Flipside, Cape Town Bookings: Webtickets Director: Geoffrey Hyland Soundscape: Charl Johan Lingenfelder Set design: Geoffrey Hyland Costume design: Michaeline Wessels Movement consultant: Sylvaine Strike Lighting design: Luke Ellenbogen

February 28, 2026, of all nights to hold the opening of The Iliad in Cape Town at the Baxter – the day that Israel and the USA launched strikes on Iran. And there was Alan Committie presenting An Iliad, which is blistering evocation of the devastation of the theatre of war. The Iliad is on February 25 to March 14, 2026.

The play by Lisa Peterson and David O’ Hare, was first presented in 2010 at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and was staged in 2012, off-Broadway. An Iliad is a play. It is a re-telling of Homer’s poem, The Iliad, about the Trojan War, and is set against the gaze of – now. Now is the outbreak of more war today, or a continuum. It is an age old story of war, loss and grief and how we forget and/or sport amnesia of convenience.

Alan Committie delivers a superlative performance as The Poet, the omniscient narrator who has been everywhere, to all wars, including February 28, with the strikes. When we saw the play on opening night, the day of the air strikes, Committie had already spliced that into Lisa Peterson and David O’ Hare’s script.

Some narrative spoilers follow. Here we are in the theatre, as The Poet, laments war and the propensity of people to go on the kill, or to get so angry that are tempted, like when we are sitting in traffic, we may joke about killing someone (that is in the script).

We forget why we are fighting, muses the poet: “How do you know when you’ve won?” The Poet likens it to standing in a supermarket line: “You’ve been there for twenty minutes and the other line is faster. Do you switch lines now? No goddam it, I’ve been here for twenty minutes, I am gonna wait in this line. I don’t mind if I wait. And look – I’m not leaving ‘cuz otherwise I have wasted my time.”

Hilarious. I thought that the above was made-up by Committie. It has a riff of the kind of gag, he would make as part of his stand-up comedy. I am thinking specifically of his shtick on the traffic circle on Ladies Mile in Cape Town and his shtick on Checkers 60Sixty. But the supermarket analogy is all in the script of An Iliad, line by line. Theatre of the Absurd.

One needs laugh lines in this play. Committie makes the lines feel as if he has written them, now, 2026, to give us comic relief and release. He is not veering off script. This is theatrical genius pinging off Committie’s comic genius.

The stark set is comprised of three tombstones/funeral pyres. They have air vents and could be underground spaces, where prisoners are trapped underground, in the dark, terrified, while people carry on above, with their lives. I thought of soldiers – prisoners of war – underground – in the dark and the powers that are fighting and bargaining for release, making demands, threats. The Geneva Convention goes out the window, in war and conflict. Often those who are fighting, do not know what they are fighting for.

A ramp in the space leads one’s eye up – to heaven? Hell? The gods? It is also skateboard ramp and playground. War as playground of horror. The funeral pyre blocks and ramp frame the space that Committie, the Poet prowls around, There is a sense of choreography to his movements as he talks and pleads with us, those who have gathered to listen. Sylvaine Strike’s movement choreography sets up an elegiac dance between Poet, Muse and the audience, at the theatre, accompanying us through the panic.

Live music soundscape and composition is by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder and he is also The Muse – the moderator? I won’t production spoil, how he is materialised but it involves Luke Ellenbogen’s masterful lighting plot of the transverse runway space and a magical transformation using the theatre space. The lighting also pinged for me as an airfield circa World War II, with lights to show where parachutists should jump in the dark. The music/sound, created live, adds a throbbing intensity to the peregrination of The Poet – physically and spiritually. Superb direction by Geoff Hyland and he has also designed the set, the site of burial, the cycle of war which is on a loop, on a ramp into perpetuity.

An Iliad is a harrowing and disturbing play, but absolutely riveting with the superlative Alan Committie as eternal roving storyteller, who makes us chuckle in parts as we gasp at every word he utters, heightened by the times that we are living in right now, locked into standing in lines that we cannot understand. Don’t miss An Iliad – monumental theatre in every way. This production, with Alan Committee as roving troubadour goes beyond re-telling on Homer’s Iliad in 90 minutes. We can get that from Google. Committee’s performance is so visceral and intense that it feels like lived experience, through unfathomable wars and conflicts. How do we know when we have “won”? And what does that mean, actually?

✳Alan Committee in An Iliad by Lisa Peterson and David O’ Hare, February 25 to March 14, Baxter Flipside, Cape Town. Pic: Claude Barnardo. Supplied.