Ben Duke’s project of reducing Milton’s Paradise Lost to 80 minutes of solo dance theatre sounds like an act of biblical hubris. Yet it’s a tribute to the wit and invention of his approach that not only Duke, but Milton and God come through it triumphant.
As Duke gallops through the story of creation, he assumes a blur of different roles. Playing God, he’s often playing himself – a shambolic, self-deprecating performer who struggles to fill the stage with his own choreography and words, just as God struggles to fill the empty cosmos.
He’s also the other main players in the drama – Lucifer, Adam and Eve – and some of the most comically charming moments in the show are those in which the relationships between them are acted out like date-night dramas (the vignette of a besotted God asking for Lucifer’s phone number is priceless).
Duke’s writing is finely pitched, as are his musical choices (from Handel to Janis Joplin); however, it’s his dance training that shines through in big set pieces: the dances of creation in which his body crashes and quivers in the throes of passion; the battle between God and the rebel angels in which he seems to swell to heroic proportions, riding an imaginary chariot, hurling boulders and spears.
But it’s not just comedy he does well. Skilfully, Duke gears the piece up to an apocalyptic prophesy of the suffering that follows Adam and Eve’s disgrace, and of God’s cosmic guilt at what he has unleashed. Just as skilfully, he shows God slowly coming back to life as the sound of a swelling celebratory hymn inspires him to dance a sweet and hopeful jig. This is so flawed, funny and oddly noble a portrait of God, that the most hard-hearted atheist may find him hard to resist.
• At Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 27 May. Box office: 020-7223 2223. Then at Pulse festival, Ipswich, 1 June.
