Hadestown

"Hadestown is a musical. It is actually primarily about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice: they meet and fall in love, and in the original myth, Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies. She goes down to Hades, and Orpheus follows. He’s the son of Calliope, one of the Greek muses, and has a little inherited musical power of his own; the music that he plays has a really alluring, compelling, sedative quality. He uses his power to go down into Hades to ask for his bride back, and in the myth Hades says no – once you’re dead there’s no reversing, no take-backsies. And then Persephone says: ‘But he did come all the way down here, and that’s sweet – that’s love. And you know what else is love? You and I, babe, we’re love.’ So Hades says: ‘All right. But here’s the deal: you can’t look back. You have to just believe she’s behind you.’ So of course, when he gets to the gate and they’re almost through, he turns around. Back down to Hades she goes. Orpheus then has a really horrible sad life, and gets torn apart by the Maenads eventually. Hadestown the musical is a Great Depression -inspired musical about Orpheus and Eurydice. They meet in a bar. Eurydice is this homeless girl who drifts from one place to the other. Orpheus is hanging out with Hermes. They meet, they fall in love, and then Hades shows up. And Hades in this iteration is the proprietor-manager, the CEO of Hadestown, a huge industrial complex which is offering lifelong employment to the down and outs and disenfranchised, and they’re earning their keep by building a wall. The idea is to build the wall to keep out all of the poor un-citizens. Stop me if this sounds familiar… One of the things I loved most about this telling is that he and Persephone have been together for a long time. So this isn’t the current trendy, super horny for each other, getting together deal. This is a couple who have been doing this for a long time. Persephone, in this version, has developed a series of substance abuse habits, because she just needs something to stimulate her. Hades realises that she’s slipping away from him, and so starts to keep her in the underworld longer and longer, which means spring is getting shorter and shorter, causing really big problems on Earth – which is where the depression and deprivation comes from. He’s sexy here, as Hades always is – for whatever reason, Hades is a sexy god – but in the musical, he’s repellent too. There are a few scenes where he really, really toes the line of abhorrent. And there’s a contract-signing scene with Eurydice, where it’s heavily implied that the contract is a signed-on-a-casting couch kind of deal, which Persephone is very aware of, and she’s jealous and vexed. And the whole Persephone-Hades relationship plays out in tandem with Orpheus and Eurydice, so you see how everything is happening simultaneously, and the cyclical nature of it all. Anaïs Mitchell, who wrote it, worked on it for ten years. She initially wrote it as a concept album where Justin Vernon from Bon Iver played Orpheus in these polyphonic beautiful songs, and she sang the female parts. And then it became an off-Broadway musical, then played at the National Theatre in the UK, then went to Broadway in the US, and it came back to the UK for its West End installation. I’ve loved it since the moment I saw it, and every time I see it, I notice new things. It’s really interesting to see how differently it’s played. Hades at the beginning of the musical, is a very different guy to Hades at the end. By the end, he’s remembered how to love, and how to be loved, and he’s almost remembered how to trust. There’s a real element of hope to how it ends. I love the way that they are so done with each other, and all the minor aggressions they do to each other, the petty little hurts and the ways they niggle and get at each other. You never get to see that version of them – but of course, if you’ve been married to someone for millennia, it’s not going to be all “Take me now, big boy”. Reality will have set in. So it’s a really fresh take on a story that we think we all know so well. She has about the same amount of power, she just wields it very differently. In the myth, she wields her power quite softly. In Hadestown she’s aggressive, she’s mean, and she’s making it very clear she’s excited to get back to Earth for spring. When she gets there it becomes a big party. You can see the hurt in Hades’ face when she goes away, and also the hurt when she comes back. She says: ‘This place is disgusting. Why are the lights so bright? Why is it so freaking loud? This is a horrible place.’ And he says, ‘I built this for you.’ But she hates it. So she still wields the power to control him, but she uses hurt to do it in Hadestown , as opposed to sexiness and youth and beauty in other versions of the story. He’s still the ultimate wife-guy for her, but she’s not a naïf anymore: she’s a woman now, with all the baggage that comes with it."