MELBOURNE, VIC. — Melbourne Shakespeare Company is proud to present Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. A luminous, poetic reimagining of the Greek myth, directed by multi-award-winning director Gary Abrahams.
Following acclaimed sold-out seasons at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne Shakespeare Company returns with a production of exceptional artistic ambition and emotional power.
Through Ruhl’s distinctive voice, the story of Eurydice and Orpheus is retold from a female perspective, weaving memory, love, and loss into a dreamlike theatrical experience.
Eurydice offers Melbourne audiences a rare chance to see a modern masterpiece staged with depth and imagination. This is theatre for those who love bold, beautiful storytelling.
To explore the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is to sit with the impossible human longing to hold onto those we love, even as time, grief, and mortality insist upon their disappearance.
When Sarah Ruhl wrote this play, she was not simply adapting a Greek myth. She was writing a love letter to her father after his death — constructing through theatre a conversation she could no longer have in life. That knowledge changes everything about Ruhl’s play. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice remains its skeleton, but its heartbeat is elsewhere.
Beneath the poetry, the wit, the dream logic and theatrical invention, lives a daughter’s grief.
Traditionally, the myth privileges Orpheus — the grieving musician descending into the Underworld to reclaim his lost bride. Eurydice herself is often little more than an object of longing, silent and idealised.
Ruhl radically re-centres the story. Here, Eurydice becomes not merely the beloved who is lost, but the central figure of the story: intelligent, uncertain, sensuous, frightened, curious.
A young woman pulled between worlds — between romance and family, eros and memory, future and past.
DATES: Thursday, May 28 to Sunday, June 14, 2026.
VENUE: fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne.
TICKETS: Click here.
