By Darby Turnbull
Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 adaption of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus has been in almost constant production since its premiere, even spawning an Opera at the Met in New York. Her whimsical, poetic and funny deconstructions of contemporary malaise that begrudgingly embraces the absurdity of our need for connection. Dead Man’s Cell Phone explored a woman’s parasocial relationship with a dead man after impulsively answering his phone. Melancholy Play features a depressed protagonist who’s irresistible to all who encounter her. Eurydice is the perfect Ruhl heroine; in flux, literally. In the original myth Orpheus is too engrossed in his music to notice she’s in peril. Bitten by Vipers, she makes her way to Hades, the Underworld. Orpheus follows, crossing the Styx and moving the stones that bar his way with his music. Once in Hades, he’s able to appeal to the Gods for Eurydice to return with him, as long as he leads and doesn’t turn to look at her.
Contemporary renderings have given her more dimensions rather than just being a passive cypher. What if she chooses to leave the world of the living? What if she has to reckon with that choice?
Eurydice in particular has some interesting insights into the narcissism of youth, romantic love and art. The certainty that they can ‘transcend’ the structures of the universe. They even get the opportunity, on the condition that Orpheus does not look back as Eurydice follows him back to the land of the living. Of course, it’s fated that he will and the rules of mortality are upheld.
“This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbours look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.”\
Ruhl’s text is an explicit platform for the innovation of a Director and their Design team, one of the reasons it’s so popular in student theatre; you can throw everything at it. Gary Abrahams is incredibly gifted at creating striking visual tableaus to evoke the characters’ fraught interiority. Designer Nathan Burmeister sets the play in stylish squalor. Orpheus and Eurydice’s love nest is a mix of instruments and trash (there’s even a used condom on the floor), you can practically smell the sweat and dust. The Underworld by contrast is a Wonderland of repurposed bric a brac and dead soil.
This iteration of Eurydice (Aisha Aidara) and Orpheus (Tomas Kantor) are hot for each other, or the idea of each other or the image of each other. A palpable eroticism runs through their early scenes together with brief moments of doubt as to the extent of their compatibility. She’s cerebral but has no sense of rhythm, music is everything to him but they’re both young, beautiful and horny and their relationship is taking up all the oxygen. Aisha Aidara is especially good at embodying how aroused she is by the atmosphere but suffocated by her own burgeoning needs. She’s at the crossroads where she’s reading philosophy but yet to solidify her own.
Tomàš Kantor’s Orpheus is a vivid encapsulation of a certain kind of person whose personal (and physical) charms intoxicate. Cocky, androgynous and intense but also deeply self-absorbed and entitled.
Though by the time we enter the story the sheen is slightly wearing off. Kantor strikes an effective balance between Orpheus’ elevated self-image and the dissolution of doubt.
Eurydice: A wedding is for daughters and fathers…they stop being married to each other on that day.
Eurydice is already looking back long before Orpheus will. Her father (John Voce) is in the Underworld yearning for her and his letters into the ether will be the bait that the Lord of the Underworld (Devon Braithwaite) will use to lure her down there.
Ruhl was grieving her father when she wrote this piece and there’s some achingly delicate movements on the tenuous links between mortality and memory. Father is an anomaly in the Underworld because he retained his memories by holding his breath going through the River Styx. When Eurydice makes her way down, she enters a second childhood and has the opportunity to relearn everything that connected her with her father; language, stories, the breadth of her own emotion. John Voce brings indelible warmth and tenderness as the dishevelled, slightly defeated malcontent who comes back to life when he shares the stage with Aisha Aidara who brings a feral physicality to Eurydice especially navigating the terror and petulance of being unformed in a grown-up body post descent.
Joshua Gordon, Fran Sweeney Nash and Miles Paras are an unsettling delight as the ‘Stones’, playing them as demonic children bullying those around them into a status quo that they’ve ceased to understand.
Devon Braithwaite’s Lord of the Underworld disperses from the text so that the character is no longer presented explicitly as a Child but a malevolently seductive shape shifter with a Man-child sense of entitlement that has a starker element of danger. He’s pure id to Eurydice’s increasingly fragile ego. Braithwaite is tremendously fun to watch; his booming voice distinctly amplified above the others and a volatile showmanship that can take the character anywhere; a late highlight is his sinister tap dance in sequined hotpants.
As impressive and well designed as the mis en scene and characterisations are, the production can often feel like a combination of too many strong ideas that can overwhelm the senses at the expense of the story and characters, especially navigating sightlines.
Eurydice is a welcome addition to Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s season before they go back to Shakespeare in August with Cleopatra and Antony.
Eurydice runs until June 14th.
Image: Nick Mick Pics
