The moment the audience stepped into The Space at Niddry Street for New Zealand company The Barden Party’s Heracles: Of Men and Beasts, we saw Hera standing high above the stage, watching us take our seats.

This one-hour musical, roughly the length of the first act of a full-length musical, opens with a number about Hera, from whose name Heracles, the ‘Glory of Hera’, takes his own. The company then leads us through Heracles’ life up to the point where he kills his daughter and is required to complete the Twelve Labours. In its attempt to modernise the mythology, The Barden Party turns the story of a hero into one about gender roles within the family. Heracles, once a loving father and husband, becomes increasingly absent as he turns towards war and heroic deeds, until that pursuit of heroism becomes inseparable from his violence and madness. Hera, meanwhile, is no longer simply the villain of Heracles’ myth. She becomes a wife, and the Queen of the Gods, whose husband Zeus is equally absent. In this version, Hera and Megara become mirrors of each other: two wives left behind by men who are increasingly consumed by their own pursuits.

This modernisation strategy, however, is too thin to carry the musical as a whole. The absent-father narrative is hardly an underexplored theme in adaptation. Most recently, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey also centres on a father separated from his family, but it places that relationship within larger questions of war trauma and the changes taking place in the current global political environment. Whether successful or not, those wider concerns give the work more nuance. Similarly, works such as Hadestown, West Side Story, and Jesus Christ Superstar all have complex ideas at their core, while also seriously considering how to make these old stories relatable to modern audiences.

Perhaps this is partly because Heracles: Of Men and Beasts feels like the first act of a larger musical. At the end, Heracles describes his fate as being written in the stars, leaving the interesting question unanswered: what does it mean for a hero to struggle in a world full of oracles, where his fate has already been written? There is something promising in that question, but for now, the production feels like it stops just as the more intriguing story is about to begin.

Heracles: Of Men and Beasts is at Upper Theatre at theSpace @ Niddry St until Sat 29 Aug 2026