Lost Dog has a reputation for taking sideways looks at classic tales and taking them into unlikely spaces, but might an interrogation of the murderous Medea in the bowels of the Royal Opera House prove a step too far?
Christmas theatre: it’s Nutcrackers and sparkle and jollity and “he’s behind you”, plus betrayal and searing revenge and infanticide … er, hang on? Dance-theatre company Lost Dog’s Christmas offering this year sounds distinctly un-festive. Ruination, by director-choreographer Ben Duke, is a reinterpretation of the myth of Medea, best known from Euripides’ play, a sorceress who helps Jason steal the golden fleece from her father and takes off with him (murdering her own brother en route). But when Jason leaves her for another woman she kills her own two sons in a rage of revenge.
At what point, I have to ask, did Duke think this was ideal Christmas fare? “I think it was just a really childish kind of contrariness,” he says, laughing. “Someone says: ‘Do a Christmas show’, and then I go, ‘What’s the least Christmassy thing I can think of?’ And it was Medea. But then I started thinking about it. If that’s the opposite of Christmas, because it’s about the death of children and Christmas is about the birth of a child, it started making sense to me.”
There was also the fact that it was Kevin O’Hare, director of the Royal Ballet, who was having the conversation with Duke, looking for something to put on in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury theatre. It’s a space in the bowels of the building: you descend multiple staircases to get there, while the cheery evergreen Nutcracker will playing on the main stage above. “So it felt like a shadow world, a subconscious,” says Duke. A trip to the underworld.
Duke, 47, has had a run of hits over the past seven years, taking well-known, much-retold stories and turning them inside out with meta commentaries that are witty, absurd and often deeply moving and truthful. There was his one-man Paradise Lost, rich with surreal tangents such as God trying to chat up Lucifer in a nightclub; it drew parallels between God’s creation and Duke’s experience of parenthood (he has two daughters), with neither entirely in control of what they’ve made. Then there was Juliet & Romeo, which imagined if the star-cross’d lovers hadn’t died and were now a middle-aged couple in marriage counselling; and, which saw one of the characters interviewing the others for a documentary.
