Is entering the afterlife like being stuck in a telephone customer service nightmare? It is a very believable kind of purgatory, and exactly the kind of clash of life-and-death and the comically quotidian that Ben Duke, the director of dance-theatre company Lost Dog, does so well. Previously he’s found new mileage in Paradise Lost and Romeo and Juliet; here it is the story of Medea, and he addresses straight off its unlikeliness as a Christmas show – all that betrayal, bloody revenge and infanticide. Or at least that’s the usual headline on Medea’s character, but here we are in an underworld courtroom, presided over by Hades and his wife Persephone in flash fuchsia suits, trying to get to the bottom of what really happened.
Ruination is a piece about the loss of children, and it’s also about myth-making, who gets to write the story, with an un-self-aware Jason (Liam Francis) glossing over Medea’s (Hannah Shepherd-Hulford) role in his heroics, or his part in her crimes. There’s a funny running joke about Hades (Jean Daniel Broussé) being a fan of The Nutcracker and having some amusing misinterpretations of the story, but with Duke’s work you’re never in doubt about what’s going on. There’s lots of text, well handled by the talented performers, who come from dance or circus backgrounds and devised the work with Duke.
Duke has a theatre director’s instinct for clear communication, but a dancer’s deftness in the way he moves between moods, scenes and characters, music, text and movement; the deeply poignant deflected by a joke (such as an anachronistic quip about Medea teaching pilates). Dance is used to get inside a moment and expand it, making visible the forces of lust, power, attraction, obstruction, struggle and fate, like the gods working with or against mortals at their whim.
The astutely chosen soundtrack is integral to Ruination, with musical director and pianist Yshani Perinpanayagam on stage alongside the brilliant countertenor Keith Pun – multiple modes in his soaring voice. The combination of Pun singing Radiohead’s Pyramid Song while Medea searches for her children is sob-inducing. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be impressed at the cleverness of it all, and you might think differently about murderous Medea.
At the Royal Opera House, London, until 31 December
