This latter is a protagonist who dodges death by allowing his wife to die on his behalf

This latter is a protagonist who dodges death by allowing his wife to die on his behalf. He is reviled for this by some of his people, just as Hughes was demonised by feminists who claimed that he was the cause of Plath’s suicide.The work is now premiered by Northern Broadsides in the resonant catacomb-like Viaduct Theatre at Dean Clough in Halifax. But Barrie Rutter’s undercast, broadly acted production does only partial justice to the tricky mix of tones in a piece that includes both high tragedy and crude comic slapstick and which ends happily when the hero’s friend Heracles fights the God of Death and brings Alcestis back to her husband. It does not help that the risible costumes and the over-strenuous northern accents give it the atmosphere of a “Carry On Up The Acropolis” fancy-dress party dramatised by John Godber.The best performance is by Andrew Cryer as Admetos, and the most gripping scene his indecorous slanging match conducted over Alcestis’s laid-out, flower-bedecked body with the tottering geriatric father who refused to die for him. Thin, shaven-headed Cryer vividly shows you a weak, guilty man trying to hide his uneasy conscience behind snarling, vindictive aggression. In some of Hughes’s most powerful verse, Admetos revealingly overstates the case against his father and mother whom he dismisses as “You and that other half-corpse you keep warm”.The poetry likewise magnificently rises to the occasion of describing the husband’s agony stuck with a life that he recognises is worthless to him without his spouse.

“Admetos is trying to gnaw himself/ Free of Admetos” declares one of the blunt Northern male chorus, likening him to a rat in a trap. Cryer is very good and ambiguous in his agonised cowering recoil in the final scene where Heracles teases the king that the veiled, silent woman he has brought back is a stranger who needs protection.But much of the production is weak. Hughes has greatly expanded the episode where Heracles, as yet unaware that the Queen has died, parties drunkenly and tactlessly in the royal palace. Looking like a superannuated heavy metal rocker, David Hounslow is much too lightweight in the role, and the long knockabout revue of the famous Labours is, well, laboriously unfunny. This, then, turns into what is potentially one of the most intriguing parts of the piece – a sequence where some of Hughes’s own trademark obsessions and self-projections (with Prometheus chained to the rock, with Heracles the unconscious wife-murderer) are recapitulated in a mood of boisterous, pointed levity. However, Rutter’s unsubtle production fails to hint sufficiently at the depth of pain that is being transcended here.

One wishes that Hughes’s magnanimous final reckoning with life had been unveiled by a supreme director of Greek drama such as Deborah Warner or Katie Mitchell.To 23 Sept, 01422 255266, then touring to 7 Oct and at Soho Theatre, London from 10 Oct.. For its new piece, opening this year’s Dance Umbrella, DV8 Physical Theatre has lightened its palette and relies even more on words than before. The title is Can We Afford This and a dancer demonstrates a not-so-accurate breakdown of the price of a ticket. “For £5 I can do graceful arm movements, for an extra £5 I can do graceful arms movements with emotion.” He strikes a hard bargain – “no refunds for loss of balance” – but the sight of him executing entrechats and brisés volés stark naked is worth any price. For its new piece, opening this year’s Dance Umbrella, DV8 Physical Theatre has lightened its palette and relies even more on words than before. The title is Can We Afford This and a dancer demonstrates a not-so-accurate breakdown of the price of a ticket. “For £5 I can do graceful arm movements, for an extra £5 I can do graceful arms movements with emotion.” He strikes a hard bargain – “no refunds for loss of balance” – but the sight of him executing entrechats and brisés volés stark naked is worth any price.
Actually, that is an exaggeration.

It is just that in the scheme of Can We Afford This, devised by the 17-strong cast under the supervision of DV8’s director Lloyd Newson, it appeared more effective than much of the rest. Not that there weren’t other highpoints: an assembly of clowns, turning their heads in absurd unison, for example; and a group dance picking up the movement style of one of the performers, David Toole, who uses his powerful arms and hands for the legs he does not have. And there is the set, designed by Liam Steel and Newson, a grassy vista that slopes upwards into the distance and intermittently reveals gaping entrances and discreet exits.But otherwise so much appears as merely mildly interesting or plain objectionable. Occupying the last category is girl-voiced Paul Capsis, a Sydney cabaret artist whose parody of outré diva-dom needs more wit and fewer clichés.The piece’s overall faults are that it seems underdeveloped and derivative. In structuring it as a series of brief disconnected sketches and dances, Newson has hoped that themes about pretence, conformity, self-worth and physical perfection – the premiere was for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festivals – would emerge. He tries at the end to link these strands up with the phenomenon of suicide, so that the piece’s subtitle – “The Cost of Living” – is a double entendre. But swamped amid profuse and diverse business, nothing hangs together or is convincingly explored.

Only the notion of physical perfection comes across loud and clear, thanks to the presence of Toole, 72-year-old Diana Payne Myers and 24-stone Lawrence Goldhuber, offsetting the youthful beauty of other performers. Toole is remarkable, a small chopped-off, floor-bound apparition, weaving below the slow shapes of tall Kate Coyne or attaching himself to other performers to share their legs and become surreally composite two-headed creatures.Newson has changed direction and adopted, maybe unintentionally, Pina Bausch’s procedures: the jokes, the prismatic accumulation of fragmentary episodes, the performers you get to know intimately as individuals. Unfortunately, Bausch does it more humorously, more profoundly, more everything, and in the process Newson’s performers – for all their attractiveness – emerge as Bausch rejects. In the past, Newson had his own accomplished and distinctive style, producing hits such as Enter Achilles and Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men. Why change? Only Bausch can do Bausch.To 29 Sept (020-7960 4242). The Ruthless Leader is a compilation of three independent books in one volume, presumably for convenience.