Knowing that this production of Paradise Lost was to be performed in promenade in the Sidney Sussex gardens, I appreciated the gall of a college which thinks its grounds good enough to double for Eden.  But the audience were led first not unto the seat of heaven but into the bowels of chaos: a low-ceilinged and sweaty room in which the we found ourselves to be infested with demons.  Immediately, the first problem faced by this production made itself known: Milton did not write dialogue, but poetry; even his epic’s long conversations are scarcely dramatic.  And to begin with, there was an apparent attempt to overcome this by speaking the poet’s words with excessive rasping and gasping in lieu of emotion on the part of Satan’s crew.

But this gave way to some genuinely nightmarish moments.  The play’s second location gave us four actors wrapped in black muslin as a shapeless Death, and a particularly hairy actor in a floral dress depicting Sin.  In their absurdity, these moments breathed a new dramatic life into the poem’s words, and formed a groundwork of formless horror on which Eden—at which we soon arrived, never again to leave until we watched Adam and Eve depart for the world—was built.

And it was in the depiction of Eden where the production was best.  The neoclassical beauty of Adam and Eve was matched by his pasted-on Tony Blair smile and her air of inscrutability.  Their shameless nudity, meanwhile, was brilliantly portrayed by having them wrapped in strange, semi-transparent garments which granted the audience more than enough view of what nature intended while also giving a suffocating, clingfilmy impression of an all-too-perfect, wipe-clean Eden, just as Milton does.

Where the promenade format succeeded best was in the awkward placelessness of the audience.  Billy Wilder’s complaint that theatre is just one permanent long-shot is rejected in favour of a kinetic viewing experience.  When Satan appears silent in the background, we are not sure whether only we are aware of him; when Adam and Eve intimately whisper to each other, we are not sure whether we are supposed to be hearing them.  This simultaneously casts a horribly personal air over such scenes as Satan’s seduction of Eve or Eve’s persuasion of Adam; and manages to place us in the ethereal, unworldly limbo whose creation is Milton’s greatest achievement in his poem.