In the uproar about the Globe, little has been said about its offshoot, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, perhaps Dominic Dromgoole’s best legacy. Where else could a production of John Milton’s Comus, “A Masque in Honour of Chastity” written in 1634 to celebrate the arrival of the Earl of Bridgewater at Ludlow Castle, be staged so naturally? In this wooden space, a gleaming coffer, Emma Curtis – singing sweetly, acting stiffly – spins around like a doll on a musical box. She is the Lady Alice Egerton, playing the part of a virgin who runs into a pagan god in a wood, and gets stuck in an enchanted chair, looking as if she were waiting for a smear test. Danny Lee Wynter plays the pagan lusciously, revolving his pelvis, savouring Milton’s verse. Philip Cumbus, comic and lyrical as the guiding spirit turned shepherd, is whisked up and down on wires to the painted clouds.
Director Lucy Bailey has taken a bold but not brutal approach. Patrick Barlow of the National Theatre of Brent has written extra material, including a punchy epilogue. His lines are light on their feet, cockeyed, with occasional panto interruptions from two flutingly goofy aristos. “Where?” asks his bro. William Dudley has designed a sewer-like rabbit hole down which the characters are sucked from stately home to fairyland; it is very dramatic – though not visible from all parts of the theatre.
Silvery chimes ring out at the undoing of a magic spell. Saxophone, border pipes and shawm weave through the evening. My only real quarrel is with the depiction of those whose lives are spent in the “sensual stye”. Lustful creatures with dirty faces gibber across the stage grunting. The masque was probably an attempt to make good family guilt: an ancestor of the Earl of Bridgwater had sodomised a servant and arranged for his wife to be raped by others. In the circumstances, it might have been suitable to make some of the grunters not underlings but lordlings.
