The return of Elisa Kragerup and the Red Room’s imaginative take on Ovid’s mythical narratives on transformations.

A woman is transformed into a bear, a man becomes a stag, and humans become trees, rivers and rocks. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the impossible comes to pass. Gods and goddesses, centaurs and nymphs, monsters or legendary creatures – no one is spared when Cupid’s piercing arrow unleashes the ungovernable forces of nature, making us powerless against forbidden lusts: a daughter falls in love with her father, a sister with her brother, Narcissus with himself. But revenge and brutality also find their way onto the boards in this grotesquely humorous depiction of the less flattering emotions, such as disdain, vanity, and unrequited love.

In the Red Room, the collective is transformed into one gigantic chuffing organism in constant movement from one form into another, like a sensual assault of interwoven words and bodies.

The Latin poet Ovid, who wrote his Metamorphoses 2000 years ago, has inspired poets through history including Shakespeare and his sonnets, which Elisa Kragerup and the Red Room have staged in an earlier season.

Metamorphoses won the Reumert Award for Best Drama of 2014.

“A stroke of genius” – Berlingske