Leyon Stolz-Hunter, Katy Brittain and Tom Morley in Eurydice at Jermyn Street Theatre. Photography by Alex Brenner.As audience members take their seats in the tiny subterranean West End institution, Sympathy With The Devilby the Rolling Stones is playing, shortly followed by Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky. Then we’re thrown headlong into the warm and fluffy burgeoning romance between the pair of Greek lovers played by Keaton Guimarães-Tolley and Eve Ponsonby. Their flirtatious innocence and sunny dispositions quickly lead to a wedding day, where Eurydice is somehow coaxed away from the festivities by a handsome besuited character the programme dubs “A Nasty Interesting Man” played by Joe Wiltshire Smith.
Soon Eurydice is plummeting into the underworld where a chorus of three stones (Katy Brittain, Leyon Stolz-Hunter and Tom Morley) offer limited guidance about her predicament and not much sympathy either. Next up, Eurydice’s deceased father (Dickon Tyrrell) inexplicably traverses the language barrier which exists twixt very dead and newly dead and attempts to make her feel at home with a room made of string (if you’re unfamiliar with key elements of the Hellenistic yarn, now would be as good a time as any to look them up)! Then returns our dashingly bearded fellow, who (this time as Hades, Lord of the Underworld), appears something of a man baby — bedecked in cut-off shorts, riding a hobby horse and uttering his lines with a generous slathering of gently lilting southern Welsh vowels.
Frustratingly, there feels to be a weirdly interesting, existential, (even metaphysical) play in the mix here…somewhere… just itching to get out…but frankly, it never quite materialises. I swear I felt Becket on my shoulder throughout the press night performance prodding me in the neck, insisting I do something to make it work, but I simply couldn’t see a way through, and I suspect that was the eventual conclusion drawn by both the writer Sarah Ruhl and director Stella Powell-Jones who have been itching for any excuse to get together again after their success with Orlando.
The promise of the opening scenes get flushed away and rushed towards a conclusion which is neither satisfactorily clear, interesting nor heartbreakingly tragic. Like both Eurydice and her father, we’re subjected to a Lethean cold bath which removes our memory of things past and we curl-up and fall asleep. I’m sure this was not the intention of all the wonderful contributors to this effort - least of all the actors who try their best to make it work, but there we have it. [Reviewer shrugs shoulders in resignation - if only as a means to dislodge Becket who has become sulky, tiresome and burdensome.]
Plays until 9th November.
