Epic performance

War is hell. But it’s also, as playwrights Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare pointedly remind us in their stage adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad (translated by Robert Fagles), all too sadly predictable; bloodlust has run in the veins of humankind from time immemorial.

Shakespeare in the Ruins opened its 10-show run of An Iliad Thursday in the burned-out shell of the Ruins at Trappist Monastery Provincial Heritage Park, with the two-hour (including intermission) briskly paced production directed by Christopher Brauer. The show runs repertory style with this year’s mainstage offering, Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, through July 5.

For their contemporary spin on Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic poem (composed of 24 books), Peterson and O’Hare distil its key battles and characters to a whirlwind tour of duty that skips between antiquity and modern times. They also wisely tell their tale not in its original dactylic hexameter, but in modern vernacular laced with F-bombs, making the narrative more palatable to 21st-century sensibilities.

Kudos to SiR artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss, head shorn and costumed in Rachel Baziuk’s ragtag overcoat and trousers, for undertaking the impressive, Herculean task of delivering an all-guns-blazing monologue as the Poet with nary a stumble.