Hercules: The Gospel According to Spectacle

Rated 🍯🍯🍯

Production photo of Hercules. Photo credit: Johan Persson

The bee arrived at Hercules armed with unfair expectations. This was, after all, Greek mythology: the great warehouse of human catastrophe. The Greeks did not invent stories so much as autopsy the human condition with wine-soaked brutality. Their myths are filled with jealous gods, doomed heroes, familial violence, existential despair, and the uncomfortable suspicion that greatness itself may be a curse.

Disney, naturally, looked at this material and thought:

“What if all of that had better lighting?”

To be fair to the production, it never pretends otherwise.

This stage adaptation of Hercules is not attempting to excavate the darkness of myth. It is not interested in tragedy, nor psychological terror, nor the moral ambiguity that allowed Greek stories to survive millennia. The show’s ambitions are entirely visible from the outset: entertain the audience lavishly, energetically, and without interruption. And on those terms, the production succeeds almost effortlessly.

The pacing is sharp. The staging glides. The special effects are genuinely impressive without becoming exhausting. The lighting design deserves particular reverence; Olympus shimmers with such conviction that the bee briefly considered organised religion. The production understands the mechanics of theatrical pleasure with almost corporate precision. It keeps the eye occupied, the ear stimulated, and the audience buoyant.

Most importantly, it remains consistently likeable.

And perhaps that is also its limitation.

Likeability is a dangerous virtue in theatre. Pleasantness tends to evaporate on contact with memory. Great theatre often leaves bruises: an unsettling idea, an emotional contradiction, a line that follows one home like an unpaid debt. Hercules, by contrast, feels meticulously engineered to ensure nobody experiences discomfort deeper than mild concern for a demigod with excellent hair.

The irony is that the story itself contains richer material than the production seems interested in mining.

Greek mythology already offers an extraordinary framework for exploring power, fame, masculinity, longing, and the unbearable burden of expectation. Even Disney’s simplified version retains the seed of an interesting question: what makes a true hero? Not strength, the story insists, but moral worth.

Yet the musical rarely interrogates this idea with enough seriousness to make it resonate beyond the theatre walls. The emotional beats arrive exactly when expected, polished to a high commercial sheen, before politely vacating the premises of the mind. The bee did not leave unsatisfied; it merely left un-haunted.

Still, there is something faintly dishonest about criticising a production for accomplishing precisely what it set out to do.

This Hercules is not masquerading as radical art. It does not wear the self-important expression of a musical convinced it is rewriting civilisation. Instead, it offers communal delight with remarkable technical confidence. Audiences laugh, applaud, gasp at the spectacle, and surrender willingly to an evening of exuberant theatricality. There are worse uses of a West End budget.

And perhaps the Greeks themselves would not entirely disapprove. Ancient theatre was never purely austere philosophy. It was spectacle too: music, ritual, movement, public emotion. The difference is that Greek tragedy often smuggled existential terror inside the entertainment.

Hercules prefers not to smuggle anything at all.

It places its pleasures directly under the spotlight, bathed in gold, accompanied by gospel harmonies, and performed with infectious sincerity. The bee cannot fault the production for this honesty. It can only admit, somewhat selfishly, that it longs for theatre which risks wounding itself in pursuit of something more enduring than applause.

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Watched June 2026 at Theatre Royal Drury Lane