Ruination review, Royal Opera House: Medea gets a brilliant update through dance

With his company Lost Dog, choreographer Ben Duke mines humour and desperation from the darkest of Greek tragedies

Zoe Anderson
Tuesday 06 December 2022 14:01 GMT
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<p>‘Ruination’ offers the underbelly of main stage happy endings </p>

‘Ruination’ offers the underbelly of main stage happy endings

Of all the subjects for a Christmas show, choreographer Ben Duke must have picked the most unlikely. Ruination is his retelling of Medea: not just Greek tragedy, but a story where a mother kills her children. Commissioned by the Royal Opera House, it offers the underbelly of main stage happy endings. “They’re dancing The Nutcracker upstairs, and you’ve chosen to come to this,” coos Hades, god of the Underworld, played by Jean-Daniel Broussé. “What does that say about you?”

With his company Lost Dog, Duke has a gift for the flipside of stories. As in his award-winning, one-man Paradise Lost, he looks for the cracks in a narrative, levering them open to find comedy and desperate loss. His brilliant Medea tips Greek gods and heroes into everyday messiness, then wonders, how could she? Did she? How could this happen?

Soutra Gilmour designs the Underworld as a bare backstage space; the river of forgetfulness is a water-cooler. Anna-Kay Gayle’s commanding Persephone brings a pink tutu from the world above. Already bewildered by their own deaths, the human characters are confronted by forms and automated phone systems. Jason and Medea both demand afterlife custody of their murdered children, retelling the story in a vivid mix of speech, song and movement.

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