Stink Foot, Yard Theatre

This production is adapted from Sophocles’s Philoctetes, one of the lesser known and more bizarre of the Greek classics. The title character is abandoned on a desert island by the Greeks, on their way to the Trojan war, because of a festering wound on his foot. Years later they realise that they cannot, in fact, win the war without him, and return to his island to persuade him to join them. Here our story begins.
Sticky staging...
This is a play that will challenge our received notions of heroism, and indeed of Ancient Greek drama, making this production is a rare opportunity for staunch classicists and fans of edgy modern theatre. Director Jeff James also promises us more thrills and spills by staging the piece with vast quantities of treacle. We’re expecting equal measures of mess and style from the director who marked himself out as one two watch with an acclaimed Pinter double-bill (Young Vic, 2011).
In writing about the play recently, James has reflected on the desire, within city-dwellers, to escape to the isolated paradise of a ‘desert-island’  This show will offer a lot more than merely a faithful revival of an Ancient play; expect food for thought, and a thrilling, sticky spectacle on stage.

Stink Foot Review: Culture Whisper says ★★★★★
Stink Foot pulls a rare, treacle-covered rabbit out of a hat in making an Ancient Greek play both tragic and hugely fun. In the bare arena of the Yard’s warehouse theatre, the sketchy doodles on the wall and plastic vultures look both like playpen and underground torture chamber. And both have huge resonance as a story of agony, revenge and deceit plays out, and men become plastic figurines in the god’s games. The text and performances are full of the wit and bathos of Green Wing or Black Books, which makes this production feel fresh and watchable for a modern audience. But it is the way lighting and sound become instruments of torture, and the central character’s grisly, treacle-smothered foot, that stain your imagination long after leaving this show.