Theatre review: Eurydice

How to tell an unconventional Eurydice story all the way to the end without Netflix cancelling it? Stella Powell-Jones' answer is of course to stick to the stage, and revive Sarah Ruhl's 2003 version of the Greek myth that sees it through the eyes of its doomed heroine. Eurydice (Eve Ponsonby) is in love with Orpheus (Keaton Guimarães-Tolley,) but their happy wedding party is overshadowed by the fact that her late father can't be there. But since he died her Father (Dickon Tyrrell) has been writing her letters from the Underworld, and on the wedding night a Nasty Interesting Man (Joe Wiltshire Smith) arrives promising to let her read one. It's of course a trap, and Eurydice is reunited with her father in the land of the dead much sooner than expected. And while the dead are meant to forget their lives, father and daughter together manage to remember, and rebuild their relationship.

Theatre review: Owners

I talk about Caryl Churchill being an outlier among playwrights, in that the older and more venerated she becomes, the shorter and more succinct her work gets. Does that mean going back to one of her first-ever plays will find her at her most rambling and unfocused? Well, yes as it turns out, but Owners, which Stella Powell-Jones revives at Jermyn Street, also shows her not only commanding some great dialogue, but also occasions when she seems decades ahead of her time. Right from the comic opening scene in fact, where Clegg (Mark Huckett) closes the doors for the last time on the butcher's shop he inherited from his father and hoped to pass on to his son. But his wife can't have children, and is such a high-flying success that she'll be the one supporting both of them from now on.

Theatre review: Jules and Jim

New Artistic Director Stella Powell-Jones makes her Jermyn Street directing debut with an adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché's iconic French novel Jules and Jim, best-known for being adapted into a Truffaut film. It's not the kind of story that would necessarily attract me, but the stage adaptation is by Timberlake Wertenbaker, who doesn't usually steer me wrong. Well I knew it was going to be French, but surely nothing has any business being that French. Taking place in the first few decades of the 20th century, Jules (Samuel Collings) is a German visiting France to improve his French, where he meets Parisian Jim (Alex Mugnaioni,) his instant platonic soulmate. They discuss literature a lot and go on a grand tour to Greece, where they see a recently-excavated statue whose smile they say they would follow to the ends of the earth if it was a real woman.