Eurydice, Young Vic Theatre

Love's young dream: Ony Uhiara and Osi Okerafor

Poetry, but too little emotion in this retold Greek myth

Since Eurydice was the ill-fated wife of Orpheus, master musician, it’s not inappropriate that this reworking of the classical myth by the award-winning US writer Sarah Ruhl should be so much like a song. Her language has a kind of blunt lyricism, and the action of her drama, with its recurrent waves of water imagery, has a vivid, surreal fluidity that eddies and flows like an elusive melody. Sometimes the playfulness is beguiling; sometimes it merely seems arch. And in Bijan Sheibani’s stark production, it is too deliberate, and too rarely genuinely moving, to permit Ruhl’s themes of love and loss to resonate.

Sweet Nothings, Young Vic

Luc Bondy directs a sleek, stylish if not wholly sexy Schnitzler update

Arthur Schnitzler belonged to a culture of inquiry and experiment, in which dreams and desire were crying out to be articulated and delineated; sexual needs were the unexplored stuff of life - how well Vienna painters like Klimt and Schiele knew this - and, as Freud worked it all out for us, not necessarily dangerous. Where better to bring this to flesh-and-blood life than on stage?

Interview: Opera and Theatre Director Luc Bondy

The divisive director returns to the Young Vic for a Viennese tragi-farce

Last September Luc Bondy watched his name speed around the world, if not for the most desirable reasons. His Tosca opened the season at the Met, a more grounded, less opulent replacement for one of the opera house’s many much loved productions by Franco Zeffirelli. As Bondy walked onstage to take his directorial bow, a chorus of boos crescendoed from the audience. They do that all the time in Milan, now and then in Paris, both cities where Bondy's work is known and accepted.

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