To quite a large extent this is exactly the play you would expect bright young private school Londoners to bring to the Fringe. It's technically proficient, has a decent aesthetic and intellectual grounding, but is difficult to relate to and outstays its welcome.Inspired by a film - itself a riff on the myth of everyone's favourite bard who struggles with simple instructions - the young Paulines re-imagine the musically gifted Orpheus as an office worker with an aptitude for ad campaigns. This is a good idea but loses the narrative significance which music has in the myth – you can't allay the beasts of the underworld with a nifty slogan.That said, the ad-man sections which open the play, comic in tone, are where the writing is strongest. Alex Fox brings out this absurdity well as a Steve Hilton-style shoeless blue-sky thinker, and I wish the company had tried a show which kept that sense of fun, rather than striving for a self-consciously dramatic profundity.Orpheus (Oliver, actually, look how modern it is) meets some ominous men in black and some supernatural stuff happens which prompts faux-philosophising about mirrors and a premature ennui from the protagonist. His wife Eurydice, no, Emily is lost in a scene with the frankly worrying implication that if a woman has not her man nearby to defend her, being dragged into a hellish underworld is inevitable. What follows is overwrought and hollow, like a porcelain tennis ball, and, worst of all, it takes a very long time. Self-consciously artistic film in the background is well-shot but struggles to mesh with action onstage after the comic elements of the beginning tableau. Though it's a trite criticism to make, the latter half of the play comes off as rather adolescent.It's depressingly apt that Orpheus gradually sinks into a kind of dull, theatrical underworld as its protagonist finds a more literal one, and more depressing still that it never turns around and starts to come out.
