Sarah Ruhl Archives - North West End UK

Interview with Stella Powell-Jones, Director of Eurydice at Jermyn Street Theatre

5Oct

By Caroline WorswickNo Comments

Interviews

Interview with Stella Powell-Jones, Director of Eurydice at Jermyn Street Theatre

North West End UK’s Deputy Editor, Caroline Worswick, discussed Jermyn Street Theatre’s exciting new production of Eurydice with director Stella Powell-Jones. A play written by Sarah Ruhl, it draws its inspiration from the Greek mythical tale of the beautiful Eurydice and the musically talented Orpheus, whose doomed relationship has been re-told by many ancient storytellers, including Ovid and Plato. Eurydice was written in 2003 by Sarah Ruhl, why do you feel that now is good time to re-imagine the play? On one hand, Eurydice is about something pretty eternal: love and earth. How do we deal with death? Does love survive death? What would we do if we got a second chance? Sarah wrote the play while mourning her own beloved Father. My own Dad died unexpectedly when I was young...

Orlando – Jermyn Street Theatre

One can’t help but wonder what Virginia Woolf would make of the Kardashians, porn ogling MPs, and rising transphobia. She’d surely be a lively wag on Twitter, but likely view TikTok as ghastly and common. Her most popular work, Orlando, is the poetic Magna Carta of subversive queerness, wry feminism and trans magic. On Brexit island in 2022, Empire is celebrated with dim blindness, but in 1928, Woolf used her most joyful literary turn to skewer British imperialism with withering disdain. Due to its fantastical spirit, people often overlook the book’s political satire. Orlando is a transgressive free spirit, but the English patriarchy proves a persistent prison, regardless of epoch, and despite wealth, beauty and mystical eternal youth. After Orlando’s male-to-fem...

Dear Elizabeth – The Gate @ Theatro Technis

Dear Elizabeth (written by Sarah Ruhl) is an exploration of the deep yet complicated friendship between American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Ruhl’s script is a vast selection of the letters the two wrote to each other over several decades, and each night a fresh pair of unprepared actors arrive to take on the roles of Bishop and Lowell, unaware of what they’ll be performing. This interesting if not risky concept means that each audience will have a somewhat different experience, and while the letters are funny and searingly honest there wasn’t enough there for me to make up for the lack of characterisation. I found it frustrating being offered a window into the lives of two fascinating people but not being able to dig deeper into their personalities and motivations. Tha...