Theatre / ben duke
Review: Mayfest: Paradise Lost
If you’ve always wanted to know what Paradise Lost is all about but couldn’t face the idea of ploughing through pages of interminable verse, Lost Dog’s Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me) is not going to provide the solace you might hope for. Ben Duke’s one-man show only uses the sketchiest of outlines of Milton’s epic poem as a framework on which to hang a performance which intersperses ad-lib-style narrative with expressive dance pieces.
Duke is charming: boyish and engaging in the classic self-effacing, floppy-haired English actor way. He wanders out onto the empty stage clutching a chair, and just starts talking. After some light chatter and a brief outline of the opening scene of Paradise Lost, he launches without preamble or fanfare into a dance.
It’s expressive, but it’s also overlong. All the dance pieces are overlong. And what they’re expressing is sometimes only clear to the performer. Yet one still wishes him well, because he’s just so nice. And he’s dancing with such intent concentration.
The recurring sense is that feeling one has when watching a show that one’s children put on in the living room: a benevolent and encouraging smile gradually turning rictus as you look so hard for something to really applaud, feasting on the occasional nugget of far-reaching imagination or well-perceived comedy.
And this show does contain such moments: the creation of Adam is highly imaginative, the dialogues which Duke enacts between various characters have a downbeat observational humour that elicits genuine laughs, and the performer’s autobiographical fragments which interject themselves into Milton’s story with increasing presence and force are at times both touching and readily identifiable. The ending, as Duke describes all the horrors of the Earth with water cascading over him, is a powerful finale.
But ultimately Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me) fails to achieve either artistic or intellectual lift-off. There is nothing in it that truly enriches, nothing that you’ll wake up remembering the next morning. It’s a show that’s perfectly harmless, but that you wouldn’t necessarily recommend to your friends. And you won’t come out knowing that much more about Paradise Lost.
Paradise Lost was at Circomedia on Friday, May 13 and Saturday, May 14 as part of Mayfest 2016. For the rest of the Mayfest 2016 programme (to Saturday, May 21), visit www.mayfestbristol.co.uk/mayfest2016
Pic: Zoe Manders
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