Review by Simon Vickery.

VAULT Festival, deep down in London’s belly, beneath Waterloo, is the perfect place for Chivaree Circus to conjure up Hades. On a weekend evening the atmosphere is buzzing and boozy as we’re ushered into the space. Looped electronic music resonates under the arched brick ceiling, we’re all handed black face masks, the cast gradually draw us deeper and deeper into the aptly named Cavern (one of the festival’s many venues), and the door is closed behind us.

In Becoming Shades, director Laurane Marchive and producer Edward Gosling have created an engrossing, sometimes playful, and always visually impressive promenade theatre version of the Persephone myth, told through the medium of aerial acrobatics and fire elements. Key to their take on the tale are unusual renderings of some familiar characters. Charon (AbnorMalik) is a masked figure with shining orbs for eyes, who spends the show weaving between audience members, his movements alternately jerky and fluid, and somehow not quite human. But he’s also imagined as the Underworld’s caretaker, a comic twist that is nicely suggestive of the tedium that comes with the day-to-day running of any large institution, even if it does happen to be the land of the dead. Persephone (Rebecca Rennison) is protagonist not victim, tussling with her captor as well as appearing in full majesty as Queen of the Underworld, and the Furies (played by the chorus of Jessica Pearce, Rosie Bartley and Isobel Midnight) are not so much winged as (literally!) enflamed. Hades (Craig Gadd), meanwhile, has an appropriately regal bearing, stalking the space like a barely clothed playboy. Yet he is also presented to us as an object of desire, through a hand balancing act set to a sensual piece of slide guitar blues.

The show’s music, composed especially for it and performed live by Becks Johnstone and Sam West, manages to encompass an impressively broad range of musical styles, from delicate folk melodies to dubstep inflected beats, but still feels like a seamless whole. The pair are impressive and powerful vocal performers, and their lyrics are usefully evocative of the show’s mythical source material, helping us to get a more detailed sense of the interactions we are watching. The ebb and flow of the music is a wonderful foil to the show’s physical elements.

And foil it is, rather than accompaniment, because Becoming Shades’ great strength is that all its constituent parts meld beautifully, and become much more than their sum. The two aerial routines that are the show’s centrepieces not only serve to showcase the outrageous skill, strength and creativity of the performers, but, when combined with rich costumes, thundering music and wonderful onstage chemistry – all in this subterranean setting – the result is a piece of theatre that has guts and swagger.

The performance space itself, and the decision to stage it as promenade theatre, presents challenges as well as possibilities. There is often a lot of herding involved in promenade staging, and this can prompt trepidation in the audience member (where do I go next? am I doing it right?), so it was a relief to be guided around the show expertly, and with a minimum of faff, by the cast, even if on occasion it felt a bit like you were part taking part in a scene change. The low-level lighting, so important to creating a sufficiently moody vibe, nonetheless meant that it wasn’t always possible to see facial expressions or some of the smaller details of physical interaction between performers, and this hampered the cast’s capacity to express some of the finer details of narrative and characterisation. At one point during the show I found myself wondering if the promenade form was worth it, if it might not have been better to just sit us down at one end of the room. But then suddenly Persephone and Charon were stood there right in front of me, her face illuminated by the orbs where his eyes should be. It’s worth sacrificing a bit of narrative for a moment of such startling intimacy.

Becoming Shades was part of VAULT Festival, at The Vaults, Waterloo from Wednesday 25 to Sunday 29 January.