Mark Bruce is one of the most consistently thought-provoking choreographers working in Britain today. His dance-theatre pieces are often mythological in character, juxtaposing legendary themes and darkly abrasive contemporary music. His 2013 production of Dracula won the Sky Arts South Bank award for dance.

Bruce’s new work, The Odyssey, is set to a playlist including Sonic Youth, Tom Waits and Scarlatti. Christopher Tandy is a lean and scarred Odysseus with a thousand-yard stare and a dragon-tattooed sword-arm. Hannah Kidd is his anguished wife, Penelope, desperately attempting to keep at bay the menacing suitors who are waiting to replace her absent husband and take the throne of Ithaca. These two are mirrored by the Immortals, danced by Christopher Akrill and Eleanor Duval, who in various guises put Odysseus through the heuristic mill and manipulate his fate.

The imagery, as we have come to expect from Bruce, is powerful. A ram sacrificed for victory, sagging in Odysseus’s arms as it bleeds out. Penelope’s back and shoulders bloodily scored with a knife for every year of her husband’s absence. The sea, wine-dark, billowing around Odysseus’s ship. Alan Vincent, as the chief suitor, prowling the stage with baleful, psychopathic delicacy. There’s a terrific set piece for Duval, in the guise of a vampiric Circe, and for Odysseus’s crew, whom she has magicked into black-masked pigs.

D’Arquian wrote the piece, funded it, dances in it, and taught herself bass guitar so she could play in the band

The choreography is strong, a potent blend of expressionism and deft, neoballetic footwork. We see it at its best in a series of duets for Odysseus. With Grace Jabbari’s narcotically beguiling Calypso, luring him into sex-sated forgetfulness; with Duval’s viciously taunting Circe, and Akrill’s steely, shape-shifting immortal. But there are misfires, when Bruce’s confidence seems to falter and he resorts to camp. Akrill’s first appearance, in sailor vest and eye shadow, is reminiscent of his performance as the Master of Ceremonies in Rufus Norris’s Cabaret. The Polyphemus sequence, with the Cyclops as a pervy, groping Father Christmas, and featuring male and female Santas dancing to Frank Sinatra, falls flat. You can’t ironise Homer, he hooks us too deeply for that.

If not yet drum-tight, this is an engaging production. Tandy and Akrill are both impressive, but the sharpest performances are those of Kidd and Duval. Kidd’s taut, frozen gaze bespeaks a deep well of terror and despair; when Odysseus returns, and tries to embrace her, Penelope’s reaction is to thrust a knife at his throat. And Duval’s lethal bitch goddess, taunting and unkillable, is a tour de force.

Watch this space… Quests by Tara D’Arquian at Greenwich Dance. Photograph: Alicia Clarke

Another engaging if flawed piece is Tara d’Arquian’s Quests, which played at Greenwich Dance in south London last week. An immersive, walk-through work, blending live music with a murder mystery and served with lashings of existential angst, Quests occasionally overreaches. But it’s an impressive achievement for 25-year-old D’Arquian, who conceived and wrote the piece, funded it through Kickstarter, dances in it as one of three mysterious Furies who weave through the action, and taught herself bass guitar so that she could play in the band. Watch this space. She’s a force of nature.

• The Odyssey is at Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 19 March. Box office: 020-7702 2789. Then touring until 28 April