Milton was personally and politically disillusioned and completely blind when he wrote Paradise Lost. The piece has at its heart a devout Christian faith, but it’s also informed by the anti-monarchist poet’s bitterness and intense disappointment at the Restoration. So how far his sympathies lay with Satan, the rebellious and vengeful angel who defies a despotic ruler, remains a complex question.
It takes a brave director to try to recreate Milton’s extraordinary vision. How to depict the fiery pit of Hell, the glory of Heaven, the bliss of Eden? Rupert Goold, of Northampton Theatre Royal, and David Farr, of Bristol Old Vic, have courageously attempted it.
If neither succeeds entirely, both offer intelligent interpretations, with ravishing stage pictures served up on great bloody slabs of Milton’s heroic verse.
Goold’s production of Ben Power’s adaptation, designed by Ben Stones, begins with deafening metallic scraping, as if a dungeon door were opening. On a bare, black stage sits an unremarkable figure in jeans, trainers and hooded top, holding a shining red apple. He is the Son, who watches and narrates as events unfold, horrified, grief-stricken, yet compelled by the word of God (embodied here by Tim Piggot-Smith’s resonant offstage voice) to play his part.
Satan and his followers, in white silk gowns and sharp suits, but ragged and covered in blood, look as if they’ve been thrown out of some chic party that unexpectedly turned nasty. Darrell D’Silva’s Satan is intriguingly conflicted, although he lacks charisma.
After the dark thrills of the evening’s first half, Christian Bradley and Leah Muller’s insipid Adam and Eve, in their Eden of hypnotically swaying trees, struggle to retain our interest. But the power of Goold’s production lies with the tormented Son, played by Jonjo O’Neill with dignified passion, his final, cruciform pose foreshadowing the price of Man’s redemption.
In Farr’s version, commissioned by the National Theatre, the Son is sidelined, but Heaven’s loss is substantially Hell’s gain. Ti Green’s design finds Satan’s hordes crash-landed in a bleak urban hinterland. Video screens show grim stairwells, and Keith Clous- ton’s music is harshly industrial. The Garden is literally an Eden Project — the site of a divine experiment, where day-tripping angels gawp at Adam and Eve displayed in a glass case. God is a corporate bully boy and Satan (Stephen Noonan) is a sympathetic rebel with a very good cause.
Also emphasised is the way the Fall changes the bond between Adam and Eve. As they descend into marital squabbles — something Milton, a great advocate of divorce, probably knew all about — Farr seems to point up a relevance to modern sexual relationships. But as at Northampton, the characters come across as pallid and peevish rather than tragic. Neither production is perfect, then; but they offer a rare taste of strange theatrical fruit. That in itself is hard to resist.
[©,The Times, 06/02/04]
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