Month: June 2026

On 17 July Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film of The Odyssey finally reaches cinema screens, and on 19 July The London Literary Salon is doing something a little different!

Where Nolan has Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o, our own tribute to The Odyssey features Toby Brothers and Jane Wymark with special guests from the Salon community. No cast of thousands and no CGI, but together we will perform key passages from Homer’s epic in The Odyssey Live! spoken aloud, as Homer intended.

“We’re excited to see what Christopher Nolan has done with this 3,000-year-old tale, but we’re celebrating the origins of The Odyssey as part of an oral tradition, to be spoken live to an audience. That’s what we’re setting out to recreate!”

Toby Brothers

Most Salonistas already know that Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are at the core of our collective cultural heritage. These are the original models for how we make sense of our lives through narrative. Even if you have not read the works themselves, if you have seen Star Wars or read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, if you have watched Ridley Scott’s Gladiator or immersed yourself in the world of Harry Potter, you have glimpsed them in the background.

The story of how we define ourselves against our enemies (who turn out to be not so different from ourselves). The story of the struggle to return home (both literally and metaphorically). These are stories that don’t just shape other narratives, but also how we understand ourselves. Three thousand years after creating these works, Homer’s vision still inspires us and clarifies the essence of what it means to be human. 

The Odyssey Live! at Theatro Technis will hark back to these origins, offering the experience of seeing and hearing the words spoken aloud, just as the Greeks of Homer’s time would have done. Whether or not you already know the poetry, we aim to bring to life the beauty of the language and highlight themes that are as relevant today as they were in the 8th century BCE.

We will touch on the guest-host relationship, the struggle to reach home, the challenge of the soldier’s return, the difference between the inner and outer self, the shape of leadership, how we learn from encountering cultures different from our own, the press of the gods against human agency . . . all live issues in 2026!

Join us for our one and only performance of The Odyssey Live! at Camden’s Theatro Technis (Crowndale Road, London NW1 1TT). Tickets are available from the theatre box office with an earlybird booking discount until 30 June!

“The dangerous times and fatal genius of Shakespeare’s greatest rival” is the subtitle of Professor Stephen Greenblatt’s 2025 life of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance. In her review of Greenblatt’s book, Professor Emma Smith declares that “Marlowe’s life is chock-full of under-evidenced incidents that are charged with a thrilling imaginative energy. He emerges from fragmentary records already fully formed: a spy, a double agent, an atheist, a sodomite.” I am offering a single session ‘LitSalon Short’ to review the highlights of Marlowe’s brief, exhilarating and controversial life (1564-1593), before considering how art reflects life in the dramatist’s dramatic and poetical works.

On stage, Marlowe’s characters – Tamburlaine, Barabas, Faustus – demonstrate boundless self-confidence as they over-reach human, moral and physical boundaries, attempting to subordinate the natural order and the cosmos itself to their individual will. The language they use is filled with electrifying energy, breath-taking sonorities and dazzling verbal imagery.

Drawing on the depth of his rich classical education (the aesthetics and metamorphoses of Ovid, extended and elaborate similes à la Homer, the passion and brutality of Senecan tragedy, and the power of the persuasive oratory of Cicero and Demosthenes), Marlowe’s literary works also abound in the fruit of the humanist learning of his time, not least Ortelius’ influential atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), consulted to provide geographic precision and exotic, ravishing naming of places.

In the theatre, Marlowe pioneered what Ben Jonson called “Marlowe’s Mighty Line”: unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse). In launching an assault on his predecessors and their “jiggling veins of rhyming mother wits”, he provided the standard dramatic literary form that was to be adopted and developed by Shakespeare and other later playwrights.

In the LitSalon Short we will focus on the two parts of Marlowe’s first great masterpiece, Tamburlaine the Great, using these plays to illustrate his linguistic pyrotechnics and literary genius.

Tim will go on to lead a five-week study of Part 1 of Tamburlaine on Wednesdays 6.00-8.00pm (UK time) beginning on Wednesday 16 September.