‘The ultimate story of love’: Would you follow your partner into hell?

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Circus and opera come together this week to tell one of our oldest and most beloved stories: Orpheus and Eurydice, the tale of two ill-fated lovers who attempt to leave hell.

A collaboration between Circa and Opera Australia, the production – which has toured Brisbane, Sydney and Edinburgh – arrives at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre on December 2 for a limited season.

Acrobats form Circa will perform alongside performers from Opera Australia in the Melbourne season of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The details of the Greek myth ebb and flow and change between tellings, but while motivations, timeline and settings shift, the core details remain the same. A man named Orpheus and a woman named Eurydice fall in love. When she dies and is taken to hell, he follows her. Orpheus is then given one chance to lead his love back to the world of the living.

“The one rule is that he can go and get her, but he can’t turn around and look at her, otherwise she will die,” says Billie Wilson-Coffey, an acrobat who will perform in the upcoming production. This version of Orpheus and Eurydice, she explains, is “really stark. It’s set in an asylum”.

“It’s a story of desire, of love ... universal emotions that you know everyone has felt and can sympathise with,” says fellow acrobat Lachlan Sukroo. “Orpheus’s journey is quite powerful, and people ... you want him to be able to succeed. It comes from an unselfish place.”

Both Wilson-Coffey and Sukroo trained at the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne – which is also hosting rehearsals for Orpheus and Eurydice.

The time they each spent there allowed them to first explore which circus arts they were drawn to and then specialise further. One of Wilson-Coffey’s specialisations is aerial silks, which they will be performing in the production. “It’s nice to be back here,” she says.

Sukroo adds: “A few of my old coaches are going to come to the show. I spent three years here and then haven’t been back much since because we’re so busy touring. So just reconnecting with them and the local circus community, I think, is really amazing.”

The production consists of 11 performers from Circa, joined by 28 performers from the Opera Australia chorus and the two principal artists.

“Circa’s goal or mission is to push the boundaries of circus and the ways that it can be presented and represented,” says Surkroo. In Orpheus and Eurydice, “we do things like represent the emotions they’re feeling at points”.

Wilson-Coffey says: “We’re kind of a part of [Orpheus’s] psyche, or duplicates of Eurydice.”

Despite being thousands of years old, it’s a story that is being reimagined time and time again – through song, poetry, literature and screen. How, despite so many tellings, does it remain so relevant and evergreen? “I think because it’s an ultimate story of love – and love can’t exist without tragedy and loss,” says Wilson-Coffey. “It’s a full circle of every human emotion that we experience through life and through death.”