Date/Time: Thursday, 10th July 2025 at 14:30
Location: Lyric Theatre, 29 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 7ES
Price: £45 per person. Member and guest £90. Face value £103pp
Event Organiser: Pete Wells. 7 Wayfaring Court, Safflower Lane, Harold Wood RM3 0LQ
This odyssey through the underworld, told with deep-voiced folk and jazz songs, was staged in Britain in 2018 and since then has had a storming run on Broadway. But the show began as a DIY community project in Vermont almost 20 years ago. Extraordinarily, it is not just a well-honed musical machine but retains a tremendous soul and offbeat spirit.
Its creator, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, splices the myth of Persephone’s abduction by Hades with Eurydice and Orpheus’s doomed love story. Orpheus is a penniless musician who works on his thin, unfinished tunes while Eurydice looks for firewood and food in a vaguely Great Depression-era landscape. “Is this always what he does?” she wonders, while he – fey, distracted and strumming on his guitar – looks as if he deserves to lose the love of his life.
It takes a while for the dark magic to kick in. The narrator, Hermes, s full of swagger and has a stupendous voice yet the story is formless, with one song after another and little forward momentum. The alchemy is created quietly and somewhere in the first act you find yourself hooked.
Every scene becomes a set piece: big, beautiful and emotionally blasting. It is ultimately not about good over evil, tragedy vs happy endings or the artist vs the work machine of the underworld, but the value of telling stories, in spite of knowing their ending.
Event Booking
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