Superb: Ruination, at the Linbury Theatre, reviewed

Ruination begins with an ironic prologue in which a choric figure warns the audience that what follows makes unlikely matter for the festive season: look elsewhere if you’re after light entertainment, he says, because this is going to shake you up a bit. And it does. This is genre-defying physical theatre, ‘devised’ by Ben Duke, in which spoken text is combined with episodes of dance and interludes of song, playfully satirical in tone and uprooted from any boundaries of realism or historical period.

Although it is somewhat pretentious, I pretty much loved it

The choric figure is Hades, and his realm of death is the setting. Jason and Medea have just been released from their bodybags, both vying to take sole custody over their children, murdered by Medea in revenge for Jason’s sexual betrayal. Somewhat in the manner of Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the stage becomes a courtroom where the ethics of the case are debated and revisited.

Just how guilty is this slippery Medea? At first Hannah Shepherd-Hulford presents her as Jason’s willing accomplice in the theft of the Golden Fleece, then as a bored nag of a housewife who has had it with her philandering husband. Was Jason seduced and then lied to? Should Medea get off with manslaughter? Or should she drink from the water cooler of forgetfulness, kiss and make up? At intervals, the characters stop talking and instead use their bodies to reveal themselves and their emotions, moving energetically between dance and mime to the accompaniment of melancholy baroque arias and torch songs.