Oskar Keogh | 5th March 2026
It begins with a glint in the white of the eyes like a flint sparking fire. Before the audience is hushed and the story begins, the performing ensemble possesses a sinking pull. There is a vibrational quality between them, lying low and slow, which seems to hold down a roaring bellow. Although the actors and musicians lie in wait, there is an unmistakable sense that something has already begun.
The story is a familiar one, an adaptation of the ancient Greek myth of the enchanting musician Orpheus and his journey into the underworld to save his lost love, Eurydice. It is one of humanity's most enduring tragedies, having been carried forward from around the 5th century BCE. This retelling places it in our present corner of the world, a space charged with its own violent inheritances both particular and universal.
Orpheus is introduced as a stranger from a faraway land. He is draped in a white cloth and seated at the far end of the theatre in front of an elaborate carpet, which hangs like a grand woven garden behind him. The traverse stage evokes the feeling that we are being offered a narrow window into a more expansive world, the ever-still Orpheus marking its edge. With hot white lights above them and candlelight flickering between them, the characters are caught somewhere between a hospital room and a campfire, between two worlds.
The narrator, a role undertaken by Bailey, reveals to us that: Before Orpheus came, there was no music here, no songs, no tunes. Nothing to hum when you’re happy or sad. He delivers these lines from an unorthodox position. He stands behind a visible laptop flush with the audience. His descriptive prose is caught in the past tense, as if from the perspective of a timeless inertia. The performers then flesh out these scenes, drawing them into the present almost entirely with movement. They move about wordlessly, save for an occasional whisper or a collective chant. Every action they perform is completely unselfconscious, almost entirely unaware of the audience. The work of Indalo Stofile as a priestess is especially captivating here. It is as if we are observing a ritual that is not being performed for the audience.
It’s a drama which erupts and folds like a roiling sea. Much of the action is disembodied, played like a children’s game of alchemical fusion with sculptures and objects of stone, glass, brass, wood and clay. As the story progresses, the performers build intimate scenes where an iridescent glass orb might roll toward a heavy stone, and this is transformed into a grave encounter. We begin to see the seemingly inanimate world with childlike immensity.
This gradually builds, as the music does, to moments of frenzied crisis. We see Eurydice rise up from the audience only to dance and writhe into a state of exhaustion before collapsing like a clumsy foal. Death arrives in a purple coat and rips violently through the air with a chorus of chiming bells. Every moment has its particular sound, like being announced by name in a forgotten tongue. The musical composition by Nkosenathi Koela feels both ancient and immediate. As if the musicians are summoning something which once rang out as a familiar tolling but has since gone quiet.
The production is piercingly disquieting and leaves one to abandon old answers and ask new questions. But even within the theatre, while being entirely enthralled, a countermood was brewing. A rational perspective seeking to understand the particulars of the cultural and spiritual relations playing out on the stage. A mind that wished to disentangle a complex set of iconographic and symbolic referents that were being thoroughly knotted. But just as one might try to apply Freudian psychoanalysis to a dreamscape, the dream remains ungraspable. One can't help but wonder if the largely white audience received this offering in earnest, and how much of it might have evaporated into a quasi-spiritual mist.
For those sensitive and susceptible to it, there is a danger of being thrust down into another realm, only for the show to end and be stranded back in the upperworld, entirely unmoored. If this production had any intention, this might be it. This is likely the risk in summoning the fates.
The Stranger speaks to a shared human lineage that has become largely obscured in the forward march of progress. It builds a small world where fate quietly beckons you to listen, over the confused throng of traffic and the technological buzz of impatience. It cracks open a space where it is much clearer that each person, unknown to us, carries within them both untold mystery and familiar truths.