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The Odyssey Project: My Name Is Nobody

Drama

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

Writers from various diasporas create new radio poems in response to Europe's second oldest poem, Homer's The Odyssey.

The Odyssey Project: My Name Is Nobody: Series 1

Karen McCarthy Woolf

Samuel James

Maeve Bluebell Wells

Julian May

The Odyssey Project: My Name Is Nobody: Series 1: Night Shift

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Drama: Classic & Period

21/04/2017

Night Shift

Series 1

BBC Radio 4 - The Odyssey Project: My Name Is Nobody, Series 1, Night ShiftSearch BBC

In Karen McCarthy Woolf drama Odysseus's mother tries to contact him from the Underworld.

In Karen McCarthy Woolf's drama in couplets, inspired by the Underworld episode in Homer, Odysseus's mother strives to contact her son, who is working a night shift as a cab driver.

In The Odyssey there is a moving episode in which Odysseus goes into the Underworld to meet the shades of dead luminaries. He also sees his mother, and realises she has died since he left home. He tries repeatedly to embrace her, but as she is a spirit, cannot. 

In McCarthy Woolf's poem, written throughout in rhyming couplets, the story takes place in a portacabin in a port, and in a minicab. Here the mother, Cleo, who died soon after giving birth to her son, Valentine, is trying to make contact with him. Valentine is a cabbie on a night shift, and his controller on the radio has godlike power. But there is strange interference, on the radio and even his passenger's mobile phone.

Karen McCarthy Woolf is Cleo; Samuel James is Angel and Valentine and Maeve Bluebell Wells plays the Passenger.

Producer: Julian May.

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Writers create new radio poems in response to Homer's The Odyssey.

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