Review: Lost Dog’s ‘Ruination’ – the physicalising of raw humanity

Medea (played by Hannah Shepherd) and her ex-husband Jason (Liam Francis) have just arrived in the underworld. They are received by a very bureaucracy-inclined Hades (Jean Daniel Broussé) who is also obsessed with Cinderella, happening at the same time in the main stage. Jason fills out the “grievances” section in the arrival form, and we are invited to be the jury in Medea’s underworld trial. The battle includes custody of, and waiting for, their children, who have not been allowed to cross the river Styx because they had no money (Medea thought children crossed for free). Persephone (Anna-Kay Gayle), Hades’ powerful and discontent wife, represents Medea (after giving clean underwear and a tutu to a partially naked Hades). Hades himself represents Jason. From here, Medea is on trial, and all the evidence seems against her… or is it?

In the programme notes, Duke says that “our world is built for distraction and overwhelm and what we need is time to drop beneath the surface”, and that we do, except we don’t even realise it. By the end of the just over 90 minutes, we have gone through a journey which puts on stage all of humanity: the good, the disgusting, the ugly, the impossibly sweet. We see Jason lie, Medea act on terrifying instinct. Especially, we are not allowed to take distance. From the first moment when we are told that Cinderella is playing upstairs and yet we chose to watch a show called “Ruination” for Christmas we are, hilariously, part of the happenings. The exquisite play with the performances actually happening above us, the entanglement with the building and reality, make the show a lot more poignant (and the retelling of Cinderella as “arriving at the sex-party” or “wanting to escape and be a witch” is in itself so sarcastic that it not only defines the character of Hades but also the performance at large).

And when we are dropped beneath that surface, we are given a seamless integration of forms and formats, music and speech, sound and movement. The full cast of performers is superb, peeling in and out of character’s skins, between voice, movement and singing. Dance is used to complete meanings, to explode emotions, to carry the narrative forward with heartbreaking empathy. Jason’s “sexy dance” for Medea is sweet innocent love, and then it is repeated for his second wife Glauce (Maya Carroll) and followed by a duet that is pure limb-flaying passion – and indication of Jason’s not-so-clear-heroic persona. A sort-of-showbiz scene tells us that perhaps life, and death, is a carnival.

Moments of incredible poignancy are used to bring up parenthood in different grades of pain: when Medea launches herself to the Styx in search of her kids, the group choreography is painfully beautiful; Medea’s father Aeetes (Miguel Altunaga) gives us an incredibly eerie scene singing while searching for his son’s missing body pieces, attempting to give his own and finally giving up and walking towards the beautifully calming light; I can still hear Persephone’s mum screaming after her; and Medea’s last scene sending a message through Jason to their kids is the personification of raw pain. Duke and Meseguer manage to make us laugh even with all this, with references to Harry Potter being “bullshit” or Medea teaching Pilates to survive. But Ruination serves an entanglement of the sweet pain of parenthood, of history written by the winners, of raw humanity… If Christmas shows are supposed to be emotive, to make you laugh and cry and feel a sense of hope too, then Ruination is one of the best I’ve seen.