I recently saw the musical Hadestown at the Lyric Theatre in London. Drawing on that experience, I'd like to offer a closer look at Orpheus and Eurydice — a myth I hold a genuine personal fondness for.
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice from Greek mythology remains one of the most celebrated love stories in art, retold and reinterpreted across thousands of years. It endures not simply as a tragic romance, but as a myth that grapples with love, faith, and human frailty. Orpheus was a poet and musician whose singing was the most beautiful in the world. He begins a joyful life with his beloved wife Eurydice, but she dies suddenly after being bitten by a snake and descends to the underworld. Unable to let her go, Orpheus — still among the living — journeys down into the realm of the dead and sings. Moved by his music, Hades grants him one condition: he must not look back until they have reached the surface. Orpheus comes agonizingly close to the exit, but in the end he cannot overcome his anxiety and doubt, and he turns around. In that instant, Eurydice vanishes into the underworld forever, and he will never see her again.
What has kept this myth beloved for so long is not simply its ending. That final backward glance is often read not as a failure of love, but as the very anxiety born of loving too deeply — a profoundly human weakness. And so the myth keeps posing questions: Is love only made whole through trust? Can human beings bear hope all the way to the end?
The most strikingly contemporary reimagining of this myth is the musical Hadestown. Rooted in jazz and folk music, the show transplants the myth into an industrialized underground city called Hadestown. Hades is reimagined as a powerful capitalist who controls his workers, while Persephone is portrayed as a figure losing her equilibrium as she moves between the world above and the world below. Orpheus is an idealist who believes his song can change the world, and Eurydice is someone who must choose survival in the face of real, grinding poverty. The original story's arc remains intact, but the work is reborn as something entirely new by layering in the modern concerns of class, labor, and capitalism. Most striking of all is the final scene — where, even though everyone already knows how the story ends, the characters sing of beginning the tale once more. It stands as a symbol of human hope: the refusal to abandon love even in full knowledge of tragedy.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a film I personally love, also draws on this myth as a central motif. The two protagonists discuss why Orpheus looked back, and the film offers a fresh interpretation: that it may not have been a simple mistake, but a deliberate choice to see one last image of the person he loved. This moment resonates with the film's own ending, deepening our sense of the characters' fate — unable to hold on to the one they love, yet determined to keep that final memory alive forever.
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a myth thousands of years old, yet it continues to generate new meaning today. That is precisely why, whether returning to Hadestown or Portrait of a Lady on Fire, or encountering future works that borrow from this myth, you are likely to find the experience all the richer — and the interpretations all the more layered.
