Theatre / The Trojan War, A Slightly Isolated Dog. At The Q, Queanbeyan, until May 15. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

There’s not much more to be said about the extraordinary NZ theatre troupe A Slightly Isolated Dog than that they are absolutely hilarious.

Relentlessly energetic, with the five actors (in no particular order, Susie Berry, Jack Buchanan, Andrew Paterson, Jonathan Price and Comfrey Sanders) leaping into the audience to engage them in the bloodiest battles of The Trojan War, swapping roles (most of them had a go at playing Helen of Troy) and engaging innocent onlookers in the action, the company embarked on its own retelling of Homer’s Iliad.

All this is done in fake French accents which add to the zaniness of the high-turbo experience.

While the broad outline of the war remains and the main characters such as Helen, Paris, Priam Achilles and Hector are all there, A Slightly Isolated Dog sees fit to make mincemeat of the detail, jumping in and out of the characters at will.

Helen’s husband Menelaus becomes King Aaron and Achilles’ lover Patroclus becomes Luke, both drawn from the audience.

Silly props serve to indicate the characters, with strange Ned Kelly-like headpiece pieces for Achilles and Hector and a veil for Helen which allows doubling tripling and quadrupling when necessary.

The troupe members can as well can sing and we were treated to moody contemporary pop pieces matching the themes of love and war.

I’ve seen A Slightly Isolated Dog before, but I didn’t remember the searching debate that lies at the bottom of their carefully calculated mayhem.

For while discussing the machinations of Fate (always pronounced with a dramatic intake of breath) a discussion about determinism emerges. If the gods have willed everything, why don’t we all sit down and do nothing, asks one of the characters, while another notes several times how unfair it seems that he is “powerless but culpable”.

The story of The Trojan War gives ample fuel for such consideration.

Deep stuff, but delivered with so many laughs that it’s impossible to go home feeling depressed.

Oh, and there was a magnificent Trojan horse made of boxes erected on stage. Surely, without the intervention of the gods, any Trojan should have been suspicious of that.

This ridiculously wonderful show has one night to run.

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