Article

Culture

Easter

Romance

Theatre

18 April 2025

6 min read

Hadestown hints at so much more

The subterranean stage hit resonates deeply.

Freya Bradley

Freya is a curate at St Mary's Church, Islington.

A theatrical staging shows a couple seperated by a man standing between them.

Eurydice and Orpheus separated.

Hadestown.com

Hadestown – a folk jazz opera interpretation of the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice – is currently flourishing in London’s West End. Like the myth upon which it is based, Anaïs Mitchell’s opus has had many iterations. I had been listening to these songs for a decade by the time I saw the stage show. As a Christian priest, I am used to relating all myths, narratives, and fables to the story of Christianity. And yet, it was not until I saw Hadestown performed that the resonance with the Christian “myth” hit me all at once.

In the myth (and the musical), a hero goes down to the underworld to retrieve his beloved from Hades, god of the dead. On Holy Saturday (the day between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday), the church celebrates Christ’s descent to the dead and his freeing of imprisoned souls. This tradition is commonly known as the Harrowing of Hell. Art imagining this victory often depicts Jesus standing atop hell’s gates, ripped off their hinges, as he plunders the realm of a bound figure. Icons have Christ encircled in ripples of light as if he’s burst through the very walls of time and space to snatch his people from Death’s clutches. In some portrayals, he is pulling Adam and Eve – the original symbols of the rift in the God-humanity relationship – from their graves. The Harrowing of Hell receives more emphasis in Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but all Christians share some concept of Christ as rescuer, saviour, liberator.

In the mythical world of Hadestown, something is broken. The seasons have collapsed, resources are scarce. Trouble in the underworld is causing everything to be off kilter in the overworld (not an uncommon concept in ancient thought). A contemporary audience can certainly relate to references to rising seas and widespread famine, as well as to the futility and despair permeating everyone’s inner monologue. The question the show poses is: can anyone break this cycle? Is there someone who could restore a broken relationship, rescue a soul back from the underworld…even make Spring come again?

Humanity’s potential champion is Orpheus, a young man blessed with a supernatural gift for poetry and music. He is composing a melody “to fix what’s wrong”. When the song is finally sung, “Spring will come again” – the world will come “back into tune”, and “all the flowers will bloom”.

The foil to Orpheus’s optimism is Eurydice, his lover. In this version, she is not killed but leaves for the underground realm of Hadestown, seeking food and shelter. I was moved afresh by her lament (‘Flowers’), sung in the depths of Hadestown’s mines, as Eurydice, like the prodigal son from St Luke’s story, realises what a mistake she has made. Hadestown’s inhabitants, it transpires, are not just trapped by the city walls – they are spiritually captive, indentured to Hades and his vision: eternal industry; perpetual war. Eurydice can no longer remember her beloved’s name, but she can remember that he could make flowers bloom in winter. She sings a petition for him to come and find her “lying in the bed [she] made.”

We the audience know all along that Orpheus is coming, thanks to the song in the preceding act (‘Wait For Me’). Upon learning where Eurydice is, he undertakes the perilous descent to the underworld, all the while repeating “wait for me, I’m coming”. In a breathtaking moment of set design, the walls of Hadestown move aside in response to the beauty of Orpheus’s song. Eurydice’s prayer is answered by his sudden appearance, and his poignant invitation: “come home with me”.

After the bows, the cast toast to the Orpheuses of the world, who show us things as they could be.

Orpheus is soon confronted, however, with the ugly reality of Hadestown. Eurydice has already signed her life away. Beaten and defeated, his innocent worldview shattered, Orpheus sings over and over “is it true?”. He is asking something more fundamental than if what is happening around him is real. He is demanding if this, the world that is, is the world that should be. Should we let the truth belong to those who “load the dice”, he asks?

Hadestown’s walls take pity on Orpheus as they did before, echoing his song through the mines, where the workers – millions of other Eurydices – take up his song. The Dead-to-the-world realise they have been deceived, and remember who they were. And their faith starts to grow – that if Orpheus can walk out of Hades, then they can too. They want freedom.

Persephone, Hades’ estranged queen, is won over by Orpheus. But Hades understands the truth about love: one flower starts a Spring. The fall of a kingdom begins with a crack in the wall. Unwilling to kill Orpheus because of Persephone, Hades instead sets up the famous tragic terms: if Orpheus can walk all the way to the surface without looking back to check Eurydice is behind him, freedom is theirs. It is a test Orpheus is doomed to fail, thanks to his experience in Hadestown. The mentality of the underworld has come to live in Orpheus’s head, and so “the path to paradise” becomes “the road to ruin”, and the story meets its inevitable end.

And yet Orpheus does not fail as completely as he thinks. His musical gift has reconciled Persephone and Hades, and this has brought Spring to the world again. After the bows, the cast toast to the Orpheuses of the world, who show us things as they could be, and leave us with the responsibility to keep singing despite the circumstances, to reject despair, to hold on to that vision of every captive soul walking out of Hell.

Myths tell us what we collectively fear and desire. Contemporary retellings show us how these longings have changed – or not. In what C.S. Lewis called the “true myth” of Christ, we see the fulfilment of Hadestown’s hopeful vision. An early modern hymn describes Christ like Hadestown’s Orpheus – his presence “sees December turn’d to May”, making all the ground of the expectant “under-earth” turn to flowers. He is the one who has walked “the road that no one ever walked before”. The one who didn’t need to persuade the gods to empathise with him, because he was God. The one who was the perfect advocate for humankind, because he was human. Divinity without caprice, love without finitude: the one who experienced fear, temptation, ridicule – and yet did not turn back from the task. A peasant living under occupation: “this poor boy brought the world back into tune”.

I was fortunate enough to see Melanie La Barrie in one of her final performances as Hadestown’s Hermes. Her voice gives the divine storyteller a godparental authority: La Barrie’s Hermes doesn’t so much narrate the story as prophesies it. At the inescapable end of the play, Hermes stands looking down like a graveside mourner, searching for the words to reignite the company. Hermes seems to have a divine vocation to keep telling the tale “regardless of how it ends” until it changes. This act is presented to us as faith, hope, resistance. In this new reality, where Spring has returned and the cosmic order has shifted, the tale might turn out differently upon the next telling, and so Hermes strikes up the band once more.

Every year we sing the sad song again. The betrayal, the trial, the burial: the body in the tomb; the disciples in hiding. For so many, the-world-as-it-is feels like an endless Holy Saturday. The tradition of the Harrowing of Hell whispers to us to hold steady, because the rescuer is coming. “The darkest hour of the darkest night comes right before the dawn”, and a crack is appearing in the wall.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.