He has at least 12 melodies playing in his head; she has no sense of rhythm. She likes books, testing herself against the theories she finds between the pages; he thinks she should make up her own thoughts. Eurydice and Orpheus are not obviously suited, but they are young and in love. Yet the pull of death can be as strong as love. On her wedding day, chasing after a letter of advice written to her by her dead father, Eurydice topples into the underworld and back into the arms of dad. It's an inversion of the tradition in which a bride passes from the arm of her father to that of her husband.
The underworld has a touch of Alice in Wonderland about it in Sarah Ruhl's delightful and touching meditation on memory and loss, the way in which we keep love alive or let it slip from our minds, and the language of love itself. The Lord of the Underworld is a tricycle-riding tyrant who grows downwards; Eurydice's father constructs a room for his daughter out of string and love; and there's a trio of menacing stones who want to pull everyone towards oblivion.
It's a rich stew but one that isn't always stirred to best effect in Bijan Sheibani's production. The real problem is that Ony Uhiara's Eurydice and Osi Okerafor's Orpheus suggest the difficulties of love but none of its giddy passion (they don't even kiss properly). The will o' the wisp quality of Ruhl's dialogue can sound arch, particularly when it is delivered in an unnecessary American twang, and without the production to match its dancing playful vision and dark heart.
Even so, the play exerts a strong pull, moving inexorably towards a place where there is no memory, no music, no words. Just silence and stones.
