Of all the subjects for a Christmas show, choreographer Ben Duke must have picked the most unlikely. Ruination is his retelling of Medea: not just Greek tragedy, but a story where a mother kills her children. Commissioned by the Royal Opera House, it offers the underbelly of main stage happy endings. “They’re dancing The Nutcracker upstairs, and you’ve chosen to come to this,” coos Hades, god of the Underworld, played by Jean-Daniel Broussé. “What does that say about you?”
With his company Lost Dog, Duke has a gift for the flipside of stories. As in his award-winning, one-man Paradise Lost, he looks for the cracks in a narrative, levering them open to find comedy and desperate loss. His brilliant Medea tips Greek gods and heroes into everyday messiness, then wonders, how could she? Did she? How could this happen?
