Writer: Sarah Ruhl
Director: Stella Powell-Jones
Writer Sarah Ruhl’s earlier work, Orlando, was praised by the Guardian as being ‘like a dream, slippery and fantastical.’ All three descriptions could be applied to Eurydice, but alas, so could ‘whimsical’, ‘nonsensical’ and ‘self-indulgent’.
The audience is likely to be familiar with the outlines of the Orpheus story, so there is interest when the piece opens as to how it’ll play out. Here, we are shown the titular characters on a beach. Orpheus, played by Keaton Guimarães-Tolley, is strangely geeky. It seems he can only pluck his guitar and talk about music. But Eurydice, Eve Ponsonby, shows little interest. She prefers reading.
Perhaps we are going to get something of the brilliant dynamic created by Charlie Covell in their Netflix series Kaos, where Eurydice is secretly bored of Orpheus’s constant adulation? But no, for the next scene is their wedding. The play’s most sympathetic character, Eurydice’s father, Dickon Tyrrell, turns up. Being dead, he is unable to communicate directly with his daughter, but he’s written her a letter, which, in the self-consciously topsy-turvy world of the play, somehow is delivered.
The play avoids the lyricism of the myth. Eurydice’s death is caused not by a serpent, but by a tumble down stairs – neither an aesthetically pleasing nor a poetic choice. She’d been harassed by a deeply unpleasant character, played by Joe Wiltshire Smith, who admits he’s not interesting while endlessly repeating ‘that’s interesting’. He’s billed, only half accurately, as ‘a nasty interesting man’. In the underworld, he turns up supposedly as The Lord of the Underworld, but looking like one-half of Lewis Carroll’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee, an unpleasantly pubertal school boy in cricket cap and descending socks. Quite what he’s doing there is anybody’s guess. The exceptionally annoying chorus of Three Stones is another mystery, though not a very engaging one. They seem to have wandered in from some rejected Monty Python scene.
The plot runs along the conventional lines, not aiming for archetypal depths but for a sort of constant whimsy.
Runs until 9 November 2024
