Orpheus is washed-up. He eats too many doughnuts, he’s drunk, and he’s doing stand-up comedy for the gods. (That’s you and me. You might be sitting next to Hades. You might unknowingly be Persephone.) He doesn’t do music any more. Instead of stopping even the trees and rocks with his irresistible song, he now tells a story of love and loss. He cracks jokes and crumbles in front of our eyes.

His story is his own: the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. We know the tale well. But writer and performer Martin Bonger tells it wonderfully and though it feels like, as Orpheus, he has never ceased telling it since his return from the Underworld, to the audience it feels like the first time.

Interspersed with breaks to drink from a magical, ever-refilling jug, we hear of his first setting eyes on Eurydice on a crowded Oxford Street, and following her on to the number 67 bus. Of his wooing, their happiness, her death and, of course, his descent to the Underworld. Orpheus delights in showing us how his incredible song charmed Cerberus and the boatman, as he steps in and out of his own narrative to describe what happened. As he goes on, his story, and the jokes, becomes more desperate. He knows he’s getting to the hard bit.

As Orpheus’s heart breaks in front of us he reveals so much about the fundamental point of stories, and of the art telling of them. About grief, and guilt. And about ego. For in this version Eurydice is given a voice. Not only a voice within Orpheus’s tale, but a chance to reveal her own perspective too.

This is a story so mesmerizingly told that it’s easy to forget that it’s happening within the constructs of the theatre. Martin Bonger is Orpheus. His story is captivating, and devastating, and real. Even the trees and rocks would stop to listen. ★★★★★   Deborah Sims   27/02/15 at The North Wall, Oxford