Paradise Lost in Performance

Dr Puck Fletcher Paradise Lost in Performance A public talk given 9 Oct 2015 at The Place, London alongside an Introduction to Milton by Dr Hannah Crawforth, ahead of a performance of Ben Duke’s ‘Paradise Lost (lies unopened before me)’.

I’d like to start by outlining Milton’s own relationship with theatre, and then I’ll move on to the history of Paradise Lost in performance. Milton never wrote any plays, but in his early twenties, he wrote the entertainment 'Arcades' and the masque Comus, which were presented at Harefield and Ludlow Castle respectively. Entertainments and masques were performance pieces, put on at the royal court or in stately homes and gardens. They were for private, aristocratic audiences and often included members of the nobility among the cast. They involved great spectacle with music, songs, dances, and lavish costumes and scenery. But although they were performances, the exercise was a symbolic expression of social order and moral values, not a dramatic exploration of story or character. Milton’s other foray into a theatrical genre was after Paradise Lost, when he wrote a tragedy in the Greek style, Samson Agonistes. However, in his preface to the printed text he made it clear that it was a literary work, never intended for the stage. The opinions Milton expresses about drama are somewhat mixed. He held classical tragedy in high esteem, but his position on contemporary drama is less certain, and seems to change as he gets older and a bit more cantakerous. There’s a lot of antitheatrical sentiment amongst Puritans in the 1620s and 30s, but despite this, in some early poems the young Milton writes admiringly of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and claims to prefer London to Cambridge because its theatres provided respite when he was tired of study. It’s possible that his father was a trustee of the Blackfriars Theatre during this time, which, combined with growing up in a musical household, may have given him some positive exposure to the performing arts. However, Milton’s references to contemporary theatre are brief and few, and in his later writings they are largely critical. The preface to Samson describes contemporary tragedy as infamous, trivial and vulgar, and in a 1642 tract criticizing the Church of England, Milton takes moral objection to university drama as a pastime for students, who were largely destined for the clergy. He looks back on his experiences of such productions with scorn, describing the actors as fools, ‘writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons and bawds’. And yet, Paradise Lost bears the marks of real positive interest in performance and theatricality. There are references to music, dance and stage, and numerous passages, such as the description of the stars and planets in a cosmic dance, that owe a debt to genres of performance and spectacle including masque, civic pageants, the mystery plays, and Aristotelian and Christian tragedy. In Satan’s soliloquys we even see a

2 strong link to Elizabethan tragedy. [slide] Paradise Lost is perhaps particularly relevant to dance as a poem so interested in place and physical relation, and one in which its characters explore the world around them so bodily. There is also a concern with the idea of representation and communicating with an audience, such as we see in Raphael’s discussion with Adam about the difficulties of describing the war in heaven, and also a concern with the performativity of language, as God speaks the creation into being. Now in fact, Paradise Lost was actually first conceived as a play. [slide] By 1642, Milton had written a detailed outline for a tragedy called Adam Unparadised, which has much in common with Paradise Lost. There are a number of reasons why Milton may have abandoned the dramatic mode: in early modern England there were restrictions on how religious subjects could be presented on the stage, and in 1642, puritanical anti-theatrical sentiment resulted in a parliamentary ban on staging plays, which wasn’t lifted until 1660. Milton may also have had more literary reasons for the change, including his interest in epic as a suitably elevated form for his lofty subject matter, or the possibility for poetry to describe worlds and scenes that would be impossible to stage: as Milton would say ‘to see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight.’ And indeed, Adam Unparadised focuses much more on the human story, with less of the celestial and demonic narratives that we encounter in the poem. But I think that even though the final work is a poem, it’s really important that there was a stage in Milton’s thinking about this work that was dramatic. Within Milton’s own lifetime Paradise Lost was recognised as a seminal work, and through the subsequent three and a half centuries, it has been used as a source of inspiration by numerous practitioners in the performing arts. Over the next 10 minutes, I’m going to give you a whistle-stop tour of some highlights in the history of Paradise Lost in performance from the seventeenth century to the present day. While I recount, you may wish to ponder how you yourself would adapt the poem for performance. What medium would you use? How would you cut over 10,000 lines of text to a more manageable length? Would you focus only on certain scenes and characters and leave out others, or try to include as much as possible? And how important would it be for you to use Milton’s words? Or could different words, or even no words at all be employed here? The first adaptation for stage was written in 1673 or 4, with Milton’s permission, by John Dryden, [slide] the British Poet Laureate. It was called [slide] The State of Innocence and Fall of Man, and was a libretto for an opera. Dryden, a royalist and Anglican, rewrote Milton’s blank verse in rhyme and focussed on the temptation and fall of man, leaving out Raphael’s narration of the creation and war in heaven, and the Son who redeems man by Grace. Dryden also inserted stage directions for some rather ambitious special effects, such as ‘rebellious angels wheeling in the air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts’ over ‘a lake of brimstone or rolling fire’. Sadly, the opera was never scored or performed.

3 In the eighteenth century, various of Milton’s poems appeared in the theatre, with adaptations by David Garrick and George Colman the Elder to name but a few. But the most significant developments in the staging of Paradise Lost were largely musical. (And I am particularly indebted to the scholarship of Stella P. Revard in this area.) In the early eighteenth century [slide], select parts of Paradise Lost were adapted for songs and choral pieces, such as the lovers’ duet in Handel’s Alexander Balus of 1748, which is based on Milton’s marriage hymn, ‘Hail wedded love’ from Book IV of Paradise Lost. Throughout the century these borrowings or adaptations became more ambitious in scope and by the end of the eighteenth century, as well as a range of songs there were two fully scored oratorios: Paradise Lost of 1760, by John Christopher Smith with libretto by Benjamin Stillingfleet, and The Creation of 1798 composed by Haydn with a German libretto by Gottfried Van Swietan. Interestingly, playbills for productions of Haydn’s Creation at Covent Garden and Drury Lane in the early-nineteenth century reveal that, even though the libretto had been translated into English, the oratorio was sometimes accompanied by readings from Milton’s poem. The emphasis in eighteenth-century adaptations was on Paradise Lost as a Christian narrative for which the composers were simply providing an appropriate, even devotional, musical setting. The parts of the poem adapted were the hymns to creation, the angelic choruses, and the lyrical exchanges between Adam and Eve. The full oratorios also kept this focus on the Creation and Paradise; on the grandeur of God and the domestic bliss of Eden. In the early nineteenth century, we see a similar focus on devotional songs and Christian oratorios. A notable development within this is The Intercession of 1816 by Matthew King, which was the first adaptation to include the Son of God as a dramatic character. Another significant work [slide] is The Battle of the Angels by Henry R. Bishop in 1820, which is the first attempt at rendering the war in heaven and does so in an epic style. This is a real turning point in approaches to adapting Paradise Lost and we see a move away from the devotional approach of the eighteenth century to an approach much more concerned with Paradise Lost as epic. In the second half of the nineteenth century, we see a rise in the interest in Satan [slide] as a heroic character in musical adaptations, for example John Ellerton’s oratorio Paradise Lost from 1862, which includes scenes in Hell, and the fallen angels and a heroic Satan as characters. This echoes the slightly earlier interest in Satan by the literary critics and writers of the Romantic Movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. As well as increasing the role of Satan, in continental Europe composers such as Rubenstein, De Bois and Bossi emphasised Paradise Lost as a cosmic epic in their adaptations. The twentieth century, particularly after the Second World War, sees four full-length musical adaptations, and numerous individual songs and choral pieces, with an approach largely focused on a close attention to Milton’s words and structure.

4 The most notable of the full adaptations of the twentieth century is Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera Paradise Lost [slide], first performed in 1978 with a libretto in English by Christopher Fry. The action is split over 42 scenes and is faithful to Milton’s text with material taken from all 12 Books and including some material previously always cut, like the characters of Sin and Death [slide]. Penderecki restores Adam and Eve to their central place in the story [slide], with a focus on the fragility of human love and happiness and the temptation as the climax of the work. There were also some interesting staging decisions, such as the doubled casting [slide] of Adam and Eve who are performed by both a singer and dancer each, allowing for doubled actions: for example, while the singer Eve reaches for the fruit on the tree, the dancer Eve simultaneously mimes falling. The twentieth century also saw a couple of university productions. Newscaster Gordon Honeycomb [slide] adapted Paradise Lost for the Experimental Theatre Club at Oxford University in the sixties, playing the role of Gabriel. And in the eighties Professor Hugh Richmond at UC Berkeley [slide] excerpted the major speeches to create a two-hour neoclassical drama for his students. In professional theatre, we see two free adaptations in Europe that recontextualize Milton’s epic within a different culture and politics. Karoly Kazimir [slide] directed a production in Budapest in 1970, set in medieval, feudal Hungary, with God as the lord of the manor and Adam and Eve as his tenants. And in 76, Paavo Liski had Kazimir’s dramatization translated into Finnish and brought it to the Helsinki stage. We don’t know how politically pointed Kazimir’s production was, although the potential is certainly there in the feudal setting, but Liski used his production to criticise political struggles between socialists and moderates in 1970s Finland, aligning the socialists with the rebel angels. The twentieth century also saw some more experimental interpretations, most notably by Peter Minshall [slide], the Trinidadian Carnival artist or mas-man, who in 1976 designed a full-sized masquerade band [slide] for Trinidad Carnival, inspired by Milton’s epic poem. [slide] Minshall’s phenomenal costume structures depict magnificent angels and demons. [slide] The band had four movements and unfolded its grand narrative in spectacle and dance as it moved through the streets. [slide] They won band-of-the-year honours and the work was described as having a searing impact on the consciousness of the entire country. [slide] The twenty-first century promises to be particularly rich for Miltonic performance. We’re only fifteen years in and already there is a sizeable body of work. There has been a growing popularity of readings [slide] of Paradise Lost in British and North American universities, allowing for a complete fidelity to Milton’s text but drawing out performance aspects of it through orality. The photographs I have here are from the University of Cambridge English Faculty’s full twelve-book reading of

5 2008, which ran for about 13 hours with the audience allowed to drop in and out between books. Some readers chose to just read their book solo [slide], others did [slide] group readings with individuals voicing the different characters. The reading for Book I [slide] was particularly innovative in pushing at the idea of what a reading could be and creating a multi-media, multi-sensory experience. The reading, by Gavin Alexander, was combined with an installation by artist in residence Issam Kourbaj, called ‘Liquid Fire’. The chairs for the audience were set up haphazard in the black cube of the performance space, scattered about and facing all directions. The only light sources were a portable book light illuminating page and reader, and gauzes in two corners, each lit from behind by an overhead projecter unit, one adapted to project the light of a flickering candle, the other projecting light through a glass vessel of water that was being disturbed by a continuous drip that was miced up and audible at the start. Alexander gave his reading, standing and moving in and through the dark and light of the space, and sometimes speaking to the audience as if they themselves were the fallen angels, scattered on the shores of Hell. Another medium that retains complete fidelity to Milton’s text but moves it into a performance arena is recital from memory, and at least two storytellers are reciting books of Paradise Lost. David Guthrie Burns, of whom I sadly have no photo, recites dressed in a seventeenth century Puritan style costume and, while mostly offering a fairly static declamation, sometimes adds provocative staging, such as delivering Beelzebub’s speech from the pulpit when performing in a Chapel at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004. John Basinger [slide] who has memorized all twelve books, gives dynamic, dramatic, emotion laden recitals across North America with movement, facial expression, and voices. There have also been several theatrical adaptations this century. In 2004, the UK saw one production directed by David Farr at Bristol Old Vic and another adapted by Ben Power and directed by Rupert Goold at the Theatre Royal in Northampton, also performed by the Oxford Stage Company in 2006. Farr’s production [slide] was stark and modern with the fallen angels wearing tattered suits and Satan enthroned atop a filing cabinet. Goold’s productions [slide] also had some of this feel, [slide] using computer graphics to suggest the realm of Chaos and with Adam and Eve putting on modern office-wear after their fall. In both productions, [slide] the actors portraying Adam and Eve were naked on the stage, something that conveyed a real sense of unfallen dignity and, after the fall, human fragility. Like Milton’s text does, this forced the audience to confront their own fallen attitudes to the naked body. In both, Satan [slide] was given a wide dramatic range and portrayed in full complexity, and Power’s adaptation intriguingly had the Son of God [slide] take up the lines of the narrator. And there are many more: in the last five years we’ve also had [slide] Paul van Dyck’s one-man, multi-media theatrical adaptation, where he performs the poem with puppets, computer animations and a rock n roll soundscape; [slide] Samir Calixto’s

6 intense choreography that embodies the conflicting forces driving the characters on, [slide] the dancers freshly tattooed for their roles; an album inspired by Paradise Lost from [slide] David Gilmour; and now of course, [slide] the performance we’re all gathered here for tonight, Ben Duke’s critically acclaimed, ‘Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me)’.