In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Eurydice is stung by a serpent and dies. Orpheus follows her into Hades, then promises to lead her back but not look at her. He fails. She dies all over again.

Normally, since Eurydice is dead from the outset, Orpheus has the lion’s share of the story, even more so since he is famed as the world’s greatest musician.

It’s a narrative that’s continued to tease the imagination of creative artists all over the world.

In Opera Queensland/Circa’s production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, for instance, Orpheus is seen in an insane asylum grappling with the loss of his beloved, but in American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice, now staged by Amy Kowalczuk at The Mill Theatre, the ancient myth is shown from the female perspective.

Ruhl, famous for her rebuttal of the concept of female hysteria in In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), she turns the spotlight on the female psyche, allowing Eurydice (Alana Denham-Preston) and not Orpheus (Blue Hyslop), to emerge as the protagonist and to explore her experiences in the underworld, her relationship with women and questions of language and memory.

Unusually, Ruhl also gives a role to Eurydice’s relationship with her father (Timmy Sekuless), absent from most retellings – it is well known that she wrote the play for her own father.

While the bare bones of the myth are still there, the contemporary play varies in detail. Hades, for instance, is known as The Lord of the Underworld. He’s played by Michael Cooper, who also plays the character of A Nasty Interesting Man, possibly a symbolic representation of the serpent.

An intriguing set of characters is seen in a Chorus of Stones – Heidi Silberman, Sarah Hull and Sarah Nathan-Truesdale – a kind of Greek chorus and narrator.

The script runs for 60 minutes, but it’s turned out to be a very complicated production for The Mill Theatre, I find when I speak to Denham-Preston.

She praises producer Lexi Sekuless and director Amy Kowalczuk for the investment they have made in technique and for hiring choreographer Michelle Norris, who has introduced meaningful and symbolic movements and gestures throughout the play to enhance the sense of the myth and the story.

Adding to the complexity, it’s The Mill’s biggest and most ambitious set ever, because they had to delineate the difference between the underworld and the real world, created on several levels and with “ethereal” lighting, she explains.

Ruhl, she says, has rewritten the story so that Eurydice is anything but passive or silent, claiming her own voice as we follow her journey, which touches on her relationship to her father and her different layers as a female.

Eurydice, then, has her own energy, but  it doesn’t end well.

Eurydice, The Mill Theatre, Fyshwick, until December 14.