FringeReview UK 2024

Eurydice

Jermyn Street Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Classical and Shakespeare, Comedic, Contemporary, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre, Tragedy

Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“Interesting to see if … dead people who wrote books – agree or disagree with what you think.” There’s a dig at the classics. A bookish bride-to-be piques her musical intended. Eurydice proclaims a welcome rebalancing, though the pivot isn’t simply away from Orpheus, but towards Eurydice’s unnamed Father. Sarah Ruhl’s play is indeed personal, written in memory of her father, first performed in 2003. This revival at Jermyn Street Theatre directed by its artistic director Stella Powell-Jones runs till November 9^th.

Powell-Jones directed Ruhl’s shape-shifting Orlando here in 2022. Ruhl is perhaps best known for the award-winning The Clean House, from 2004 where her own writing is flushed through with skeins of myth and tripwires to the gods.

Eurydice (a quizzically radiant Eve Ponsonby) is explaining to her music-obsessed lover Orpheus (Keaton Guimarães-Tolley, adroit in his lyric balance of gush and geek) the pull of the past, where his art exists only now. There’s trouble in an idyll. If Orpheus wants to create a twelve-stringed instrument or symphony with Eurydice’s hair, Eurydice wants to cap it by making “a new philosophical system. It involved hats.”

Ruhl’s riddling, mischievous text is poetic with misdirections. You expect Eurydice to reject self-absorbed Orpheus but it isn’t so simple. He’s better than his obsession, and Eurydice is pulled three ways.

Unique to this version, it’s Lethe-immersed Eurydice brought to memory by her Father (Dickon Tyrrell, kindling authority in tenderness) who’s managed to retain his memory and write her letters. Indeed letters to and from the dead are the only thing bar books that actually reach their recipients. Definitions of words, rather than music, dominate the play, rooted in Ruhl’s relation to her parent.

Tyrrell’s Father has already intoned: “A wedding is for a daughter and a father. They stop being married to each other on that day.”  That is singular. After Orpheus manages to dip a whole volume through Dis there’s a reverse-Lear effect. Tyrrell brings his daughter Eurydice to herself quoting Lear: it aches with magical thinking. Ponsonby and Tyrrell act magically together too.

Indeed Ponsonby rightly centres this production, stippled with both bewilderment and grief; and at other times quizzical warmth when in the upper world, lighting twisty paths between lives.

If Father relates verbatim directions located in Ruhl’s life, Orpheus is released into dreams. It lends him an understanding he doesn’t always achieve with Eurydice when awake, and a humanity elsewhere muted in underwhelming letters Guimarães-Tolley realises in a ripple of communion: “I said, why is water coming out of your hair? And you said, gravity is very compelling.”

In this reading Eurydice is essentially kidnapped Proserpine-like by Nasty Interesting Man/Lord of the Underworld (Joe Wiltshire Smith). In the upper world Wiltshire Smith’s garbed like a Victorian criminal with bowler hat; and in the underworld bursts in schoolboy garb and cap, half Humpty Dumpty half Dennis the Menace. Wiltshire Smith revels in this, more criminal underworld than Plutonic: a controlling bully, truculent with desire. Defunct billionaires come to mind.

Ruhl has directed an Alice in Wonderland feel to Dis. It certainly lightens the palette.  It’s where Katy Brittain (with a comedic Eumenides meow), Tom Morley and Leyon Stolz-Hunter triple up as choric Stones (Little, Big and Loud respectively). They glumly pronounce prohibitions throughout like an outtake of Cats, in magnificently horn-headed charcoal onesies, the apex of Emily Stuart’s costume design:  “Dead people should be seen and not heard.”

Nevertheless they exhort Eurydice to depart. When she arrives earlier they point out to the audience: “Eurydice can’t speak your language anymore. She talks in the language of dead people now.” “It’s a very quiet language” another rejoins. ”Like if the pores in your face opened up and talked” the third concludes. Ruhl, a poet first, allows her language to lead Eurydice (and Eurydice) into what Keats celebrates as “uncertainties… {and not} irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

That too means the pores of this play talk too, and its conclusions leave uncertainties, where each production nudges an emphasis one way or another. Jermyn Street being intimate certain things are immaculately realised.

Tina Torbey’s midnight blue-grounded set with flecks and splints of sun features moveable feasts of curved steps and references the stairwell descent to the cellarage of the theatre; though everything’s contained. Chris McDonnell’s lighting bathes it in tenebrous glimmers so (as Ruhl asks) there’s deliberately little distinction between upper and lower worlds. And if Carmel Smickersgill’s sound crosses Orpheus’ instrumental music (a conjuring of strings) and the patter of rain, it’s a realisation of Lethe, waters of forgetfulness sousing everything.

The end surprises. Textual directions clarify a certain ambiguity where the limits of an elevator where it rains inside are clearly not possible; and no-one misses a red tricycle. No one production can realise all Ruhl’s strands, but Powell-Jones coaxes provisional miracles from her cast and space. The medium’s playful, even fun. The message though is bleak; and love is still in the letting go.

Written by Sarah Ruhl, and Directed by Stella Powell-Jones, Set Designer Tina Torbey, Costume Designer Emily Stuart,  Lighting Designer Chris McDonnell, Sound Designer Carmel Smickersgill,

Casting Director Marc Frankum, Assistant Director and Movement Director Elliot Pritchard,

Assistant Set Designer Pauline McGrath, Wardrobe Placement Abbie Burland, Costume Maker Colette Robinson-Colcutt, Intimacy Co-ordinator Hannah Goalstone

Production Manager Luc Mewis-Mckerrow, Stage Manager Lisa Cochrane, Scenic Construction Basement 94, Production Carpenter William Edwards, Drapery Drapemakers, Set Electrician Edward Callow, Production Technician Ted Walliker, Crew Joe Collins & Heather Smith

PR David Burns, Photography Alex Brenner

Executive Producer David Doyle, Producer Gabriele Uboldi, Producing and Production Assistant Rory Horne, Special Thanks to Jessica Bachmann, Anita Belec, Duo Hafren

Published October 11, 2024October 11, 2024 by Simon Jenner