Eros and Psyche

by June Clark

Went to see this on Saturday. For the past plays I have seen, I have thought that I just love all plays in general and would so love any play I watch. But this play I must say was really horrible. I wanted to scream very badly during the play. First a summary of the play from the Stirling Players website.

Audiences will be taken on an enthralling journey as the Stirling Players present the World Premiere of Eros and Psyche, a mythical musical about the most romantic love story of all time.

Eros, the young and mischievous God of Love, doted on by his mother Aphrodite, falls in love with the beautiful mortal girl, Psyche. Their forbidden romance forces Psyche to not only face her envious sister, but prove to Aphrodite she is worthy to be with her son.

This is a story of how the soul suffers to reach that place of unconditional love where nothing can destroy this most powerful of emotions. 

Firstly, the main cast's physique do not really match for what they are to portray. For instance, Psyche and Aphrodite were fat. I mean it is very hard to convince the audience that they are beautiful and graceful beings when they are that fat and ungraceful. 

All this would be fine if they could act well and sing well. But I found the cast selection for Eros and Psyche very bad. I could only feel a monotonous stream of emotion from them and that is of sadness, longing and helplessness. This even in their moments of happiness and light-heartedness, there was no dynamics to their performance, just a depressing dredging of miserable suffering, which inadevertently made me miserable as well.

Some other casts members were even worse, the guy playing the King had a very weak voice and I could barely hear what he was singing. And also acting was also wooden and sound like just reciting the script. Even worse, there was a moment when one of the actresses forgot her lines.

All that said, there were some positives from the cast, I thought the Queen (Psyche's mother),  and her 2 sisters were done very well and also the part in between where there was a little side story of how a guy who did not want to be with an ugly hag, ended up together because Eros shot him an arrow to fall in love with her. These were all done quite well. To this point, I think it is very bad casting when the main actresses did so poorly when those with smaller roles acted with so much more conviction, range and depth. I understand this is community theater, but surely those more skilled should be given lead roles.

Lastly, is the story and play itself. This is an original musical written by June Clark. So I have to commend her for writing the whole script and also coming up with all the original music by herself. But that's how much praise I could give her. The story as a whole I found somewhat disjointed and unfulfilling. The character development was poor and there were characters that were coming out at weird times which was not organic to the story progression. Also the ending was not very conclusive, for instance what happened to Psyche's sisters in the end. And the ending seemed to have quite abruptly wrapped up.The tone throughout was monotonous. I knew where the story's climax should have been  but I did not feel it in any way.

The music itself was not very good. There was too much repetition and this made it very boring and I at moments just wished they would stop singing and get on with it. Also the melodies were very flat, and again with no dynamics. There was too little character interaction in the music. One instance that stood out very clear, when Aphrodite was in rage finding out Eros had fallen in love with Psyche, the song should have been more powerful. It should not have just been her singing more vigorously (which was not portrayed very well), but also have her assistants singing in a huge chorus to strengthen the dramatic effect. Very poor.

As a whole, I thought it was a good idea but very poorly executed. It could have been so much better. It did not leave me feeling the pain of lost love, of wanting, and of when love was found. It just left me feeling disappointed.