mon 02/12/2024

Eurydice, Young Vic Theatre | reviews, news & interviews

Eurydice, Young Vic Theatre

Eurydice, Young Vic Theatre

Poetry, but too little emotion in this retold Greek myth

Love's young dream: Ony Uhiara and Osi Okerafor Alastair Muir
Since Eurydice was the ill-fated wife of Orpheus, master musician, it’s not inappropriate that this reworking of the classical myth by the award-winning US writer Sarah Ruhl should be so much like a song. Her language has a kind of blunt lyricism, and the action of her drama, with its recurrent waves of water imagery, has a vivid, surreal fluidity that eddies and flows like an elusive melody. Sometimes the playfulness is beguiling; sometimes it merely seems arch. And in Bijan Sheibani’s stark production, it is too deliberate, and too rarely genuinely moving, to permit Ruhl’s themes of love and loss to resonate.
Since Eurydice was the ill-fated wife of Orpheus, master musician, it’s not inappropriate that this reworking of the classical myth by the award-winning US writer Sarah Ruhl should be so much like a song. Her language has a kind of blunt lyricism, and the action of her drama, with its recurrent waves of water imagery, has a vivid, surreal fluidity that eddies and flows like an elusive melody. Sometimes the playfulness is beguiling; sometimes it merely seems arch. And in Bijan Sheibani’s stark production, it is too deliberate, and too rarely genuinely moving, to permit Ruhl’s themes of love and loss to resonate.

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