Review by Simon Jenner, June 20th 2025
“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 Brighton’s New Venture Theatre, directed by Sam Chittenden in the Upstairs theatre runs till June 28th.
Leila-May Lewis-Dupuy and Andy Clawson. Photo Credit: Kelly Garcia
Chittenden directed Ruhl’s award-winning The Clean House here in 2016. Indeed Ruhl is perhaps best known for that 2004 breakthrough; where her own writing is flushed through with skeins of myth and tripwires to the gods. Uniquely Chittenden makes Orpheus non-binary too.
Eurydice (a quizzically radiant Leila-May Lewis-Dupuy) is explaining to her music-obsessed lover Orpheus (Maria Veness, adroit in their lyric balance of gush and geek) the pull of the past, where Orpheus’ 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. They’re better than their obsession, and Eurydice is pulled three ways.
Unique to this version, it’s Lethe-immersed Eurydice brought to memory by her Father (Andy Clawson, 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.
Clawson’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. Clawson brings his daughter Eurydice to herself quoting Lear: it aches with magical thinking. Lewis-Dupuy and Clawson act magically together too.
Indeed Lewis-Dupuy 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. Clawson’s performance is radiant: he fills his space with wonder, warmth and loss. But unlike other productions I’ve seen, he’s idiomatically spot-on too: believably Ruhl’s – and Eurydice’s – father.
If Father relates verbatim directions located in Ruhl’s life, Orpheus is released into dreams. It lends them an understanding they don’t always achieve with Eurydice when awake, and a humanity elsewhere muted in underwhelming letters Veness 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 (a creepily jocund Andy Hoggarth). In the upper world Hoggarth’s garbed like a businessman; and in the underworld, gleams. Hoggarth revels in this, more criminal underworld than Plutonic: a controlling bully, truculent with desire. Ruhl’s given him man-baby moments which Hoggarth pitches, wheedling then darkening his tone. Defunct billionaires and all-too-living presidents come to mind.
Ruhl has directed an Alice in Wonderland feel to Dis. It certainly lightens the palette. It’s where Maria Sturt (with a comedic Eumenides meow), Nadine Rayburn and Sophoulla Gibson triple up as choric Stones (Little, Big and Loud respectively). Rayburn and Gibson harmonise giggles with Sturt, more skittish than another performance I saw at Jermyn Street last year, more sheerly exuberant: “Dead people should be seen and not heard.”
Permanently lit in emerald green, they glumly pronounce prohibitions throughout like an outtake of Cats. Chittenden’s and Karen Hindmarsh’s costume design, elaborate with Father (a beautiful waistcoat), fluorescent with Eurydice, gamine with Orpheus, here relies on light shades to pick up the green.
Nevertheless the Stones 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; its conclusions leave uncertainties, where each production nudges an emphasis one way or another. This one makes Orpheus non-binary. Chittenden pushes the agency of feminine voicing: all three Stones are women. Jermyn Street’s production (helmed by Stella Powell-Jones) featured the standard four men and three women. Here the balance is reversed. This vocal palette irradiates the underworld: limbo’s lighter on its feet.
Seeing this again confirms it’s a fiendishly difficult play to realise: tonally, directorially, the balance of comedic dark with laughter as chortling Tenebrae over 90 minutes. Chittenden, more equipped than most to realise Ruhl’s world, gets closer than others I’ve seen.
That helps counter Dis: the Upstairs releases caverns of dark interleaved with screens and lifts. Rob Punter’s charcoal-grey-grounded set with sun-flecks features the stage edge as Lethe; and places the stairwell descent upstage. Sabrina Giles’ lighting bathes it in tenebrous glimmers so (as Ruhl asks) there’s deliberately little distinction between upper and lower worlds.
At one moment Eurydice’s dress proves fluorescent in blue lighting. And if Chittenden’s sound crosses Orpheus’ instrumental melos and the patter of rain, Steve Hoar’s original music plucks a naggingly memorable string theme. Against this the soundscape’s a realisation of Lethe, waters of forgetfulness sousing everything. Becki Chandler touches in a dream choreography underwater: nothing sudden.
The end surprises. Textual directions clarify a certain ambiguity. Here the team realise a miracle others have ducked: an elevator shimmers with rain inside. Though no-one misses a red tricycle (more man-baby leavings). No one production can realise all Ruhl’s strands, but Chittenden 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.
Stage Manager Moon Berglind,, ASMs Claudia Ezraeelian, Bryony Weaver, Gaby Bowring.
Set Design Rob Punter, Set Construction Lead Simon Glazier,
Set Construction and Painting Simon Glazier, Tomasz Baraniecki, Tabitha Fawcett-Fry, Leah Mooney, Annie Sheppard, Dan Tranter, George Walter
Costume Design: Sam Chittenden, Karen Hindmarsh
Costume Hair and Makeup Assistant, Tabitha Fawcett-Fry
Hair and Makeup Flea Traini-Cobb, Samantha Howard
Lighting Design Sabrina Giles, Assistant Lighting Design Chris Dent, Lighting Operation Sabrina Giles, Chris Dent, Carrie Hynds
Sound Design Sam Chittenden, Sound Operation Ewan Cassidy, Joanna-Joy Salter, Carrie Hynds, Sound Recording Alistair Lock
Properties Sam Chittenden, Aidan Scanlon
Poster Tamsin Mastoris, Programme Tamsin Mastoris, Photography Kelly Garcia, Publicity and Social Media Elysa Hyde
Choreography Assistance Becki Chandler
Health and Safety Ian Black. Best Boi Roughton Gibson
Leila-May Lewis-Dupuy, Maria Sturt, Nadine Rayburn, Sophhoulla Gibson. Photo Credit Kelly Garcia.
