Water remembers everything, Milkweed Productions lets it speak.
Every generation, it seems, decides it invented uncertainty, and every generation eventually reaches for the same two-thousand-year-old stories to talk itself down. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses gave New York audiences something to hold onto in the aftermath of 9/11, a reminder, delivered through myth, water, and movement, that transformation is possible even when the ground has just shifted underfoot. Milkweed Productions revive that premise for a moment with its own, entirely modern flavour of catastrophe, and the timing feels less like an instinct. Grief has a way of becoming hope, isolation of becoming connection, endings of becoming beginnings.
Two shallow pools sit at the centre of the room, in which the cast wade into from the opening minutes, hemlines soaked through for the duration. Director Eileen MacDonald stages the piece in the round, letting the action spill onto the minstrels’ balcony and through the audience, so the myths arrive like gossip passed down a long dinner table. Natural light through the high windows is left largely alone until dusk, when candles are lit and set floating on the water, and the whole room seems to settle into something closer to a spell than a stage.
The production’s visual identity leans hard into the ethereal, white drapes, bare feet, a programme and marketing image of a woman half-hidden behind a translucent veil, ringed by flowers and pomegranates, the kind of image that could double as a Del Rey-esque album cover. It’s classical sculpture read through a very contemporary, faintly melancholic lens, sincere to the point of daring you to find it embarrassing. It reads, in the best sense, like exactly the kind of production a talented group of recent graduates would make, full of conviction, unafraid of beauty for its own sake and not yet worn down into cynicism. That earnestness turns out to be the most telling thing about the production, a company still trusting that beauty can do the work on its own.
The costume rail seems to know nobody here is staying who they are for long, and dresses accordingly for an endless summer that belongs to no particular decade. A cardigan sitting next to a draped hem without either looking out of place tracks given these people are about to turn into a tree or a bird. Amy MacDonald has designed for the instability and the clothes hold up under all that shape-shifting without once drawing attention to themselves.
Antony Lam’s sound design does patient, unshowy work with a solo violin that surfaces just rarely enough to be missed, live harmonies that hang in the air after the actors have exited, and the crackle of a 1930s radio broadcast.
The real strength of the evening lies with a cast of ten, each moving through half a dozen roles or more, and finding in that constant doubling the appeal of the exercise. Harry Pritchard is a standout shapeshifter, sliding from Midas, smug, gilded, allergic to good advice, into a tender Eros. Cameron Quinn Chavers pulls off the inverse trick just as neatly with her cool composure as Aphrodite before curdling into something unsettling and comic as Hunger. Rachael Dowsett finds real ache in Myrrha’s forbidden longing, Brandon Jewell makes a meal of the spoiled, sun-scorching Phaeton, Lucy Krubiner is a versatile performer on stage, vanishing completely into each new role. Abigail Devine gives Pomona a stubborn edge, refusing every one of Vertumnus’s increasingly desperate disguises with the patience of a woman who’s seen this bit before. Anne McCarron holds a long character list without dropping a thread, Chéri McKenzie, also the production’s movement director, keeps the ensemble’s transformations fluent while managing several of her own, Shannon Smith wears every character he’s handed with authority, and Eileen MacDonald, directing and performing, anchors the evening as a devastating Eurydice.
Ovid has rarely looked so alive, or so entirely at home in a room full of candlelight and wet hemlines. Milkweed Productions have achieved theatre that earns every bit of the faith it puts in its audience- a company whose next move is worth waiting for.
Metamorphoses’ run at Hammersmith Club, London has now concluded.