Hadestown ★★★☆☆

Making Hades—the god of the underworld, the dead, and wealth—a fossil fuel barron is a cute choice, and Alastair Parker’s booming Yorkshire accent works shockingly well for it. The characterisation of the characters is fun all around, with Orpheus as a complete dork and Persephone as the depressed live-of-the-party alcoholic and sometimes utter freak contortionist for some reason. Judging from the posters outside we had a understudy for Persephone rather than Rachel Adedeji, so I’m unsure if that is normally part of the characterisation. I suspect the attempts at an American accent that gradually slip away probably isn’t (most of the cast other than Clive Rowe Hermes stick with British and it works well in spite of the early 20th century American influence in the setting).

The parallels it out with the mix of settings is interesting. The harshness of winter in the the classical world with economic and environmental catastrophe of the Great Depression, the underworld as a corrupt company town, love and unity with solidarity and unionism, and even just the parallelling Hades and Persephone with Orpheus and Eurydice, but it also feels like all of that is struggling against the story of the original myth. It seems like for a while it is gearing towards a happy ending, but with Hades conflicted between not wanting to smother a rekindled love with Persephone and not wanting to lose face and appear weak, lets Orpheus and Eurydice back on the same condition of the original myth, with Orpheus failing in the same way. Despite it being utterly inevitable it still feels shockingly sudden within the play, which I suppose is appropriate: Death is like that.

But we tell the story anyway in the hope that it might somehow, impossibly, turn out another way.