After twenty seven years, David Wenham’s much anticipated return to the Sydney Theatre Company stage does not disappoint.
To tackle a play of historical importance and with the length of Homer’s Iliad may seem ambitious, even when the text is by New York actor Denis O’Hare and theatre director Lisa Peterson and is truncated to just 100 minutes.
Their text of An Iliad sees Wenham on stage for every moment of that, delivering huge amounts of dialogue and business that engages the audience for every moment, while taking us on an epic ride of history and an interior of the soul examining mans’ foibles with war through the ages.
Playing The Poet, Wenham’s character lives through the times from the wars of Troy to the present war with Iran, as he inhabits the soul of Achilles as he falls into inaction when his king Agamemnon takes his concubine, Briseis.
Later in the production his actions result in the death of his other lover, Patroclus, by the sword wielded by Troy’s mightiest warrior, Hector. All of this worldly behaviour is watched by the gods, who are as capricious and as capable of infighting as the humans.
Wenham’s commanding prowling of the stage, deliverance of lengthy slabs of dialogue and ease of breaking the fourth wall, means that we are in no doubt of his own power to engage, just as Achilles once commanded the battle field.
Within no time, the audience is at ease and enthralled with the epic that is about to unfold, as we sense early on that we are in the hands of a master practitioner of art of theatrical performance.
One moment of particular poignancy is when Wenham’s character reminds us of where the bodies on the battlefield came from, relating this to the First World War and the towns across Australia that sacrificed their youth for the sodden fields of the European conflagration.
The success of this production is does not belong singularly to Wenham, but also to the well attuned collaborations between all artistic contributors. Without the expert direction and blocking from director Damien Ryan, Wenham’s performance would have been impossible to deliver.
He is also more than ably assisted by onstage performer and composer Helen Svoboda, an Australian/Finnish musician, whose ability to conjure sounds out of her double bass border of the extraordinary, while adding her caterwauling vocals to provide a complementary audio and aural texture to Wenham’s commanding vocal and physical performance.
The simple black painted set (Charles Davis), lit largely by industrial lamps and neon strip lighting, works perfectly to give us a sense of timelessness as the madness of war is repeated through the ages
Sound design from Brady Watkins likewise does not interfere with the performance, while giving us sharp and strong beats to mark major emphasis, complementing Wenham’s delivery of the text.
For those who think of history, even mythical history, is only about the dead, An Iliad has a sharp comment to make about present times, and how after three and a half millennium, while we have made enormous material progress, we have not learned to tame the conflict of the beast that lies within us all.
In An Iliad, David Wenham has delivered us a lesson that we could all learn, while providing us with a powerful performance from another lesson of the ancient Greeks, the magic of theatre, and one that is truly transformative.
An Iliad
Wharf 1 Theatre – Sydney Theatre Company, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay
Performance: Monday 20 April 2026
Season continues to 21 June 2026
Information and Bookings: www.sydneytheatre.com.au
Images: David Wenham in An Iliad – photo by Daniel Boud | David Wenham in An Iliad – photo by Daniel Boud | Helen Svoboda and David Wenham in An Iliad – photo by Daniel Boud
Review: John Moyle