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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16 July 2024

6 min read

Tech has changed: it’s no longer natural or neutral

The first in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

A caveman holding a hammer looks at a bench on which are a broken bicycle and a laptop.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

My son was born in February last year and it seems that every day he is developing new skills or facial expressions and adorable quirks. Just the other day he was playing with some wooden blocks and when they inevitably fell over, he let out the most adorable giggle. As you can guess I immediately reached for my phone so that I could capture the moment. Moments like this happen all the time in the life of a modern parent- we want to share with our spouse, family, and friends or just capture the moment for ourselves because it’s something we treasure. And yet, in this series of articles I would like to consider this moment, and the thousands like it that take place in a technological society, and ask: is everything as benign as it seems?

There are two ideas that often come up whenever people talk about technology. The first is that technology is basically ‘neutral’, that technology only becomes good or bad depending on what you are doing with it. “Look at a hammer,” someone might say, “there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about this hammer, only the end result is good or bad depending on whether I’m using it to hit nails or people!” On this reading of technology, the only important questions relate to the consequences of use.

If technology is neutral, then the primary concern for users, legislators and technologists is the consequences of technology, and not the technology itself. The only way to ensure that the technology is used for good is to ensure, somehow, that more good people will use the technology for good things than bad people using it for bad things. Often this idea will present itself as a conversation about competing freedoms: very few people (with some important exceptions, see this article from Ezra Klein) are debating whether there is something intrinsically problematic about the app formerly known as Twitter, most discussion revolves around how to maintain the freedom of good users while curtailing the freedom of bad users.

We assume that these tools of social interaction like Facebook and Instagram are, in and of themselves, perfectly benign. We are encouraged to think this by massive corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining our use of their platforms, and at first glance, they seem completely harmless: what could possibly be the problem with a website in which grandma can share photos of her cat? And while the dark underbelly of these platforms has violent real-world consequences – like the rise of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred – the solution is primarily imagined as a matter of dealing with ‘bad actors’ rather than anything intrinsically problematic with the platforms themselves.

Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools.

The second idea is related but somewhat different: Advocates of modern technology will suggest that humanity has been using technology ever since there were humans and therefore all this modern technology is not really anything to worry about. “Yes, modern technology looks scary,” someone might say, “but it’s really nothing to worry about, humans have been using tools since the Stone Age don’t you know!” This view proposes that because hammers are technology, and all technology is the same, there is, therefore, no difference between a hammer and the internet, or between the internet and a cyborg.

This second idea tends to be accompanied by an emphasis on the slow and steady evolution of technology and by highlighting the fact that at every major technological advancement there have been naysayers decrying the latest innovation. (Even Plato was suspicious of writing when that was invented). Taken as part of a very long view of human history, the technological innovations of the last 100 years seem to be a normal and natural part of the evolution of our species which has always set itself apart from the rest of the animal kingdom in its use of technology.

Steve Jobs gives a good example of this in an interview he gave about the development PC:

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condors used the least energy to move a kilometer. And humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list… not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation… But then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a human on a bicycle blew the condor away – completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me… It’s the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with… It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds”

Notice that Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools: one is more complex than the other but otherwise, they are just technologies that expand human capacity. “A Bicycle for our minds” is a fascinating way to describe a computer because it implies that nothing about our minds will be changed, they’ll just be a little bit faster.

And yet, despite the attempts of thought leaders like Jobs to convince us that modern technology is entirely benign, many of us are left with a natural suspicion that there is more going on. As a priest in the Church of England, I often have conversations with parishioners and members of the public who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed at some point (fairly recently) about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives. That modern technology is not simply the natural extension of the sorts of tools that humans have been using since the Stone Age and that modern technology is not neutral but in significant ways has already had an effect regardless of how we might use it. How do we respond to such articulate and thoughtful people such as Steve Jobs who make a compelling case that modern technology is neutral and natural?

I often have conversations with parishioners who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives.

Thinking back to that moment with my son when he giggles and I take a photo of him, at first glance it seems completely innocuous. But what resources are available if I did want to think more carefully about that moment (and the many like it) which suffuse my daily life? Thankfully there is a growing body of literature from philosophers and theologians who are thinking about the impact of modern technology on the human condition. In the next two articles I would like to introduce the work of Martin Heidegger, outline his criticism of modern technology, showing how he challenges the idea that technology is simply a natural extension of human capacity or a neutral tool.

Heidegger is a complex character in philosophy and in Western history. There is no getting around the fact that he was a supporter of the Nazi Party during the second world war. His politics have been widely condemned and rightly so, nevertheless, his insights on the nature of modern technology continue to this day to provide insights that are useful. His claim is that modern technology essentially and inevitably changes our relationship with the world in which we live and even with ourselves. It is this claim, and Heidegger’s suggested solution, that I will unpack in the next two articles.