Charmless cod rock opera fails to deliver ideas

Published on Tuesday 28 August 2007 11:57

Orpheus X **

Royal Lyceum

DULL and overblown, although beautifully staged, the American Repertory Company crash into the Orpheus myth with all the subtlety of a joyrider in a stolen Ford Capri.

This is the ancient myth re-imagined in a modern New York setting.

Orpheus, played by composer and writer Rinde Eckert, is some kind of guitar-wielding, rock music hero; a celebrity with a worldwide following.

Which is exactly how one might imagine an Orpheus-like figure in the 21st century. After all, the myths say that he was supposed to have been able to charm the animals with his music.

Eckert's Orpheus stops there, however. There is no charm in this creation, no magic in his fingertips as they run across the fretboard of his guitar. He is a dull, self-obsessed, boring old bloke.

His arrogance is fair enough, but there is nothing to the character Eckert creates on stage. Indeed, it is flattering to say that he creates a character at all.

The plot of the play takes the story of Eurydice, Orpheus' wife in myth, who dies of a snake bite and who he goes to Hades to save.

Having charmed Persephone at the gates of Hades into allowing him to take her back to earth, Orpheus famously disobeys the instruction not to look back, and she is lost to him again.

In Eckert's version, Eurydice is unknown to Orpheus until a taxi he is in runs her over and she dies in his arms. Suddenly, he is obsessed to the point that he goes with her to A&E and even steals her possessions before any of her family can be informed.

For most of the performance Suzan Hanson as Eurydice is wandering around the stage dead. She is in Hades where John Kelly as Persephone promises her that she will forget all she has ever written and every time she reads it, she will come to it fresh.

All through the performance there are videos of Eurydice wandering around naked, badly superimposed over the video of a building being demolished. In death she is returned to her original state, presumably.

The irritating thing about the whole piece is that it has big ideas, and good ones too, but it fails to deliver them in any coherent manner. If it was performed as an art installation it would be a supreme experience.

As theatre, or more properly opera as it is sung right through, it is just a mishmash.

Even Eckert's use of the fashionable take on the whole Orpheus and Eurydice myth, in which she doesn't want to come back from Hades, is so poorly done as to seem to be an add-on.

As theatre this only works at the points where music is intrinsic to the plot - where Orpheus charms Persephone and then when he loses Eurydice for the second time. Everywhere else it is cod rock opera of a form that other more talented rock musicians have done better.

Updating the classics is one thing, but it does help if you can find a way of making the material relevant to a modern audience.

Otherwise, what is the point?

• Run ends tomorrow