Something about it wouldn’t leave me alone.
A week on from seeing SCO’s Aphrodite, I was still thinking about it. Not because I was moved, but because I wasn’t. The work left me emotionally untouched, yet it triggered a cascade of conflicting thoughts I’ve been wrestling with ever since.
Perhaps it’s the NIDA course I’ve just finished and my brain is wired to notice things like tone, structure, and narrative payoff. Or maybe I’ve just grown suspicious of surfaces, especially when they’re too slick. Or I was simply triggered—which, in its own way, is a perfectly valid (and arguably the most productive) reaction to art.
What lingered wasn’t one specific flaw, but a tangle of tensions—and above all, a sense that the work was deeply in love with its own shine. And yes, perhaps that was the whole point.
Art often falls for its own cleverness. It’s seductive to chase the beautiful line, the high-concept idea, the thematic frame that sounds important. But the hard part is erasing a pretty phrase when it turns out not to be true. And by true, I don’t mean factual—I mean resonant. Recognisable in the hidden corners of our own experience. By the time you’re over forty-five (as most theatre audiences are), you’ve lived through enough complexity to sense when something’s just skimming.
Beauty, especially in performance, can be a slippery accomplice. Even with the best intentions and the sharpest collaborators, it’s easy to start following the shine: the elegant structure, the seductive image, the clever delivery. But the challenge is staying with the grit—the contradictions, discomforts, and unspoken truths that give a work its spine. Beauty can work like sleight of hand: a clever distraction, too smooth to catch. Personally, I like a wrinkle. Otherwise, it’s all just moisturiser and metaphor.
Maybe that’s the real Aphrodite Complex—our tendency, in art and life, to worship beauty even as it distracts us from what lies beneath.
And maybe that’s the question I keep returning to: how do we talk critically about beauty using beautiful bodies, beautiful voices, beautiful design—without any relief from, well, beauty?
And the beauty I trust the least is the neat bow at the end of things—the lure of the Insta-ending. Aphrodite‘s Taryn Brumfitt-style finale—close your eyes and delight in your other senses—felt overly polite. And politeness, like beauty, often slips in just when things are about to get interesting. I don’t want my art to tie things up. I want it to resist that temptation. To leave us unsettled, curious, still reaching.
If the ultimate goal was not to move me but to get me thinking—it worked. I’m still turning it over. And that might be its own kind of success. While it showed no wrinkles, it left me with one.
And to continue the litany of beauty: there were some very pretty clarinet lines.
Or maybe this is just a pretty thought.