With the performance unfolding against a black background, we set foot into the mystery of a black hole, where no one, no thing and even no light can escape.

Lights flicker, music waves fill the space, we (the audience) are mesmerised as STYX transports us back into the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice intertwined with writer and performer Max Barton’s own family legends.

Highly acclaimed musical STYX – winner of the weekly Award at FRINGE WORLD 2019, shortlisted for the Total Theatre Award and nominated for Best Musical Production by Broadway at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2019 – comes to FRINGE WORLD Festival 2020 by Second Body Company and Australian Base Music Group.

STYX expands the heart-wrenching moments of love when one partner is trapped on the other side, in the realm of the underworld. And whilst there is a single ray of hope in the border between light and darkness, existence and nothingness, it is buried in just one furtive and forbidden glance. Can Orpheus resist not looking back to Eurydice?

In an attempt to revitalise his grandmother’s gloomy memory, diminished by Alzheimer’s, Max takes a look back to her golden years in 1952, when his grandfather established a music club, Orpheus.

STYX brings the audience original music and lyrics, a true story of family ties, a glance back to Greek myth, some highly interesting scientific information regarding memory and provocative ideas about the afterlife.

The performance is dazzled by Jethro Cook’s lightning design that immediately communicates the central idea of the link between light and memory, life and death.

Light comes from memories. The separate bulbs of light – the segments of memories- join as the drops of a river, the STYX river. The drops of the river flow through the waves of music and join the generations as the rings of a chain, highlighting the basic human feelings of love and fear.

STYX evokes a true sense of pure life, one we rarely feel in our day to day experience and as such, we stay memorised for a long time.