THEATRE / The man who missed his connection: Paul Taylor reviews Greg Doran's production of Derek Walcott's splendid retelling of The Odyssey

'SORRY I'm late,' says Ron Cook's pocket-sized Odysseus as he scrambles in to join the other Greeks for Achille's funeral, near the start of Derek Walcott's splendid new re-telling of The Odyssey at The Other Place. It's a nice impish joke that our first glimpse of the hero shows him a touch tardy with appointments, since the famous, much-delayed homecoming the piece goes on to dramatise could be said to take unpunctuality to epic lengths.

'Art has surrendered / to History with its whiff of formaldehyde': this stricture (from Omeros, Walcott's earlier Homeric invocation) could not be applied either to the play or to Greg Doran's well-acted and resourcefully spectacular production. No stale breath of the museum hangs about either. The universality and timelessness of this myth of man's powers of survival are brought out in the shifts and clashes of idiom and cultural allusion.

A current equivalent for the blind Greek bard is found in the blind black blues-singer and beggar (Rudolf Walker), also the voice of the people's suffering. Sometimes, two epochs are hauntingly juxtaposed, as when the underworld turns out to be a desolate London Underground, the rails separating our ancient Greek hero from the shade of his mother, who stands in a modern black shawl and scarf, on the opposite platform. It's a piercing moment when she looks across the gulf of the track and asks 'Is that how I smile?', her son's ageing face the only reflection she has seen of her own since dying.

The Cyclops (excellent Geoffrey Freshwater) becomes a grotesque, bloated tyrant who would make Ubu Roi seem quite slim and brainy, his police state a place where thinking is a criminal offence. In trying to resist the various temptations thrown in his path, Walcott's hero is wise enough to know that it's himself a man should fear. 'At the back of all men's minds is a rented room' is how he vividly puts it, as his crew are turned to snuffling hogs in the calypso-resounding world of Circe.

Shakespeare's Pericles (also about a wanderer) is saved from becoming an episodic ramble because all the situations the hero encounters are weird distorted images of each other. With its sophisticated use of flashbacks and inset narrative, The Odyssey is in no danger of seeming a simple matter of 'and then, and then, and then'. But as it heads into the home straight, Walcott's stage version starts to include echoes of its own past in the Shakespearean manner. Sometimes, this is done scenically as when (courtesy of a Greek pun) the loom on which Penelope weaves the shroud is formed by the masts and ropes of her husband's ship. Sometimes, it's done with a doubling of actors. Here, to Odysseus's disturbed mind, the suitors he has butchered rise from the floor and depart as the ghosts of his dead Greek comrades. This delusion merely exacerbates the complaint of Penelope (Amanda Harris) that, in slaying the men, he has brought a second bloody Troy to her home. A bit too politically correct, perhaps, this Penelope, and it's not altogether clear why the carnage suddenly becomes all right when she learns that its perpetrator is indeed her returned husband. All the same, the couple's first embrace reduced this reviewer to tears.

Visually delightful (with such exotica as mermaids wagging kinky black plastic tails), the production is deeply satisfying in emotional terms. That most appealing of actors, Ron Cook, makes Odysseus the most human of heroes, a quick-witted, vulnerable everyman whose palpable yearnings for Ithaca bring home to you what home can mean.

In rep at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon (0789 295623)