Beowulf: The Blockbuster

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An attempt to clothe the most famous of Old English epics in the tropes of the modern blockbuster in a metal hut in the Pleasance might seem a fool's errand. Beowulf is as epic as it gets. There's dragons, underwater battles, treasure hordes, magic swords. Bryan Burroughs, though, is no fool. There's something far more intelligent going on in his one-man-epic.

Sure enough, Beowulf gets the Hollywood treatment: he kicks like Bruce Lee; he comes from "a land far away...Sweden"; he defeats a monster with claws like Freddie Krueger. But all that sits within a narrative of a father relaying the tale to his film-obsessed son. Less an attempt to rescue a story from the eighth century, the play-within-a-play is an affirmation of its enduring thrill and vigour. The grammar of the modern blockbuster is, it seems, still in the mode laid down in those 3182 Old English lines.

But more than that, this is a moving story of a father trying to tell difficult truths to his son at a tragic moment in their relationship. "It's just a story. It's just about life as people have lived it. You can make it mean whatever you like," he tells his son in a lump-in-the-throat moment of calm. Were it just a tear-jerker, this would be a flimsy play based around a wonderful solo performance. Instead, this finds the human heart beating at the centre of literary epic.