Here is a triumphant revoicing of famous tales. A double act of ventriloquy. Two thousand years ago, Ovid’s Heroides reimagined Greek myths in the form of letters from ingenious, abandoned women to their celebrated lover heroes. Now Jermyn Street and Digital Theatre take off from these in 15 streamed monologues, each by a different hand and with a different speaker. Language and settings are contemporary: laptops, ironing, a police cell. The brutality and incisiveness of the stories is not tamed.
Adjoa Andoh, Tom Littler and Cat Robey direct. Johanna Town’s lighting washes the screen with sealight and shadow. Nicola Chang and Max Pappenheim’s soundscapes bring a crash of waves, the babble of rumour – and as Medea approaches a cot, the tinkle from a child’s mobile toy.
The reinvention is multifarious. Bryony Lavery does not simply redescribe Ariadne (Patsy Ferran, febrile in silk pyjamas): she makes the thread with which she guided Theseus from the labyrinth into an absorbing metaphor – a web of veins, the beginning of string theory. Eleanor Tomlinson proves capable of far more than Poldark palpitations in Isley Lynn’s strong script. Taut but natural as Canace (daughter of the god of the winds, by the way), she has a smile that looks increasingly strapped-on as she explains to a scandal-hungry interviewer that she actually loved the brother with whom she went to bed. Sabrina Mahfouz’s eloquent fury shows a fervent Rebekah Murrell as Helen of Troy’s daughter, Hermione, dobbing in her husband as a rapist. In Nathalie Armin’s bold performance, Samantha Ellis’s script makes turning into an almond tree look like empowerment.
It would be hard to rival Olivia Williams’s beautifully calibrated contempt as she curses Medea, with whom Jason has scarpered (“your mother won’t like her”). The words she speaks are by Natalie Haynes, who has for some months been posting breezily radiant Instagram videos based on the Heroides, titled Ovid Not Covid. Everyone should now be more avid for Ovid.
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