What drove Ted Hughes to adapt Alcestis, the Euripides play in which a wife dies in order that her husband may live? The temptation is to see it as a deeply personal work hewn out of Hughes's relationship with Sylvia Plath. But one virtue of Barrie Rutter's premiere production for North ern Broadsides is that it allows us to see the play in larger, more visionary terms.
Hughes's version is anything but straight Euripides. He keeps the structure whereby Admetos, the king of Thessaly, accepts his wife's sacrifice of her life for his. He also preserves the magical conclusion in which Heracles resurrects Alcestis. But where Euripides casts his sceptical eye over woman's unequal relationship to man, Hughes makes this a story of struggle and, finally, hope in which death is conquered not just by Heracles but by unswerving love.
Hughes heightens the conflict in several ways; one is by sharpening the exchanges between Admetos and his father who refuses to give up his own life. His chief innovation is to make Heracles a pivotal figure who, while sojourning in Admetos's house, re-enacts his 12 labours. My first reaction was that this clogs the narrative, but Hughes's purpose is twofold: to motivate Heracles's act of human resurrection and to show that all existence is a struggle between death and love.
This spirit informs Hughes's Birthday Letters; it also lurks behind The Winter's Tale. Hughes is consciously tapping into the great Shakespearean reconciliation-myth as the silent Alcestis is restored to her husband. And Rutter's production plays on those links by having Joanne Thirsk's Alcestis preserve a touching statue-like stillness as she awaits her husband's reclamation.
The production has a stark severity - a brick-walled background, shadowy vaults - but given the optimistic ending and the modernity of Hughes's language I wished that the production were lighter in tone. The acting sometimes succumbs to armpit rhetoric and the costumes, making Admetos and his courtiers look like a group of shaven-headed transvestites, are odd.
Despite the gear, Andrew Cryer is a suitably suffering Admetos, David Hounslow is a bluff Heracles and Barrie Rutter himself gets things off to a brisk start as a scene-setting Apollo. But if it is a stirring evening it is largely because of Hughes's moving insistence on the power of memory and passion to triumph over death.
At the Viaduct Theatre until September 23. Box office: 01422 255266. Then touring. This review ran in some editions yesterday.
