This Satan sparkles in brilliant show
Paradise Lost
(out of 4) By Erin Shields. Adapted from the original by John Milton. Directed by Jackie Maxwell. Until Oct. 21 at the Studio Theatre, 34 George St. E., stratfordfestival.ca or 1-800-567-1600
Let’s have a moment of appreciation for Lucy Peacock. The actor, in her 31st season at the Stratford Festival, is having an incredible moment.
Not only does she elicit rounds of applause after her breathless tirades as Volumnia in Robert Lepage’s Coriolanus and receive a deity’s entrance as Juno in Antoni Cimolino’s The
Tempest, she manages to spew out the world’s greatest evils and still remain a narrator an audience will follow into the depths of hell as Satan in Erin Shields’ brilliant adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Peacock is just one of many reasons to see the world premiere of Shields’ work — her latest classical adaptation, after The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Lady from the Sea and the Governor General’s Award-winning If We Were Birds — at the Stratford Festival, directed by Jackie Maxwell. Peacock is a sly, cunning Satan, charming and sexy; cool and proud; defiant of God (Juan Chioran) who banished Satan and her followers to hell; incensed by the arrival of God’s son and the required obedience to him, but still yearning for God’s acceptance and to return to her place in the clouds. And, above all else, she’s angry — as many women are, deep down — and ready to tap into her darkest impulses if no other course is available.
Another reason to see the show is Erin Shields’ irreverent, extremely funny and stingingly contemporary script.
Satan is immediately accessible from her opening lines: “I stared back up through the endless tunnel down which we’d been hurled, cursing the Almighty for sentencing us to Hell. I mean … wouldn’t you?”
Many plays, in theory, try to implicate the audience in their plots, usually asking us to identify with their moral ambiguity. But Paradise Lost is the most effective production at the festival, not only through Shield’s script but Maxwell’s direction. The house lights are up, Peacock is magnetizing and Shields gives her words that are at once timeless and etched into this very time and place. Social media, Trump, climate change, these are our trigger words to listen up. She might be Satan, but at least she gets it, right? Let’s hear her out.
Ultimately, that’s the biggest twist of the knife. As the story unfolds, the audience learns how this charmer is the reason we’re not all living in perfect bliss in the Garden of Eden. In a terrifying tirade, Peacock rails against God, finally accepting her lot as the villain to his hero, unspooling a list of the darkest evil you can think of. At the same time, Satan proves the use of such a villain—try to resist the sweet relief of having someone to blame for murder and genocide and child sexual abuse and patriarchy in general, instead of grappling with the complexity that it comes from within humankind.
These questions sneak up on you, because most of this twoact play flies by, filtered through Shields’ creativity and sense of humour, performed by a cast of 12 and handled masterfully by Maxwell.
Alongside Chioran’s God, world weary with knowledge, Gordon S. Miller is pure love with a backbone as God the Son and Sarah Dodd is a pleasure as Sin, a spurned former lover of Satan’s sacked with Death (Devin MacKinnon), an aimless son guarding the gates of hell. Shields finds particular inspiration in her version of Eve and Adam, played by Amelia Sargisson and Qasim Khan: two innocent beings that devolve from an equal partnership to a contemporary critique of heterosexual relationships as a result of the forbidden fruit.
Again, here, Shields has a particularly cutting knack for articulating the idiosyncrasies of our world and letting us laugh knowingly at them at the same time; the way Adam and Eve argue is clear therapy speak, processing their emotions out loud in real time, but their disparate punishments as they’re banned from the Garden are an attempt to explain a much bigger, graver gender dynamic. With such an ambitious, sprawling play — it takes place everywhere and at every time, includes a play within a play, a musical number by the Chorus of the Chosen and the most luxurious Garden imaginable — Judith Bowden’s set design underwhelms, with a tower of button-up shirts in a white to black gradient as the main piece.
Stratford’s new works are risky for the festival so they get the smallest venue and often the smallest budgets. But when they work they’re the hottest ticket; Paradise Lost has already been extended and the run is almost sold out.