The Fall of Man at the Brewery Theatre, Bristol

A couple of weeks ago, I was able to see a performance of Red Shift’s The Fall of Man at the Brewery Theatre, Bristol. Being able to think through the theatrical potential of Milton’s texts without having to rely on reviews and playscripts was a long-awaited blessing. Here was a well-recommended production from a praised theatre company, adapting Paradise Lost for a twenty-first century urban audience, unashamedly low-key and non-spectacular, entirely engaging with both the seventeenth-century text and modern relationships.

The play follows Peter - a middle-aged, middle-classed married white male, who begins an affair with his young, poor, Slovenian nanny, Veronica. At first connected through their love of art and dissatisfaction with their respective societies, soon the pair are talking less about art and more about oral sex and making excuses to “Mrs”. Inevitably, the middle-classed white male will not leave his wife for the Slovenian nanny, and the Slovenian nanny becomes bitter that her dream of having a rich husband and a swimming pool are shattered. Quickly escalating from stolen nights of forbidden sex to a bitter argument over class, money and sexual fidelity, the audience witnesses the emotional power of the modern break up, interlaced with the words of Milton’s Adam, Eve and Satan.

PL is used throughout in asides – not entirely embedded in the twenty-first century script, but always used to focus the audience’s mind, and set the tone of each scene. Although never justified by the characters, Veronica seamlessly takes on Eve’s words, as Peter speaks Adam’s, the Narrator’s, and Satan’s words. As in PL, the play opens with Peter already falling and, speaking lines originally spoken by Satan about his fallen state, Peter’s fall from grace necessarily parallels falling in love with Veronica. The temptation to infidelity it always symbolised in eating and tasting the forbidden fruit – which becomes an anachronistic use of the modern phrase referencing sexually circumspect acts. However, giving Peter lines from both Adam and the Son means that not only does temptation become the forbidden fruit, but Veronica herself as the object of the fall. Peter looks on at the peaceful garden and is jealous (as Satan does in book IV), but also looks on the fruit, and wants it. It is at this point that Peter and Veronica begin their affair.

Veronica, however, only speaking lines originally for Eve does not have as much chance to look or survey her circumstances as Peter does. As she recounts how she first met Peter (speaking IV.449-492) Veronica’s love seems simple and unabashed; she sees Peter as her “other half” (IV.488), and as the only one she loves. However, it is hard not to also sense Veronica’s own narcissism as she speaks the lines, a narcissism that becomes wildly apparent in the last argument between Peter and Veronica at the play’s finale. She, as a young nanny in a foreign city, is evidently not the innocent or ignorant first woman. In bed with a married man, Milton’s lines sound filled with hope on her lips, and yet the audience are made well aware in the modern lines throughout the play that Peter and Veronica are not completing one another emotionally, physically or spiritually – there is always “Mrs”. Furthermore, true to Milton’s text, it is the woman who falls first. Except, in falling for the fruit, Veronica is not gaining knowledge, but giving Peter oral sex – and it is Peter who speaks the narrator’s lines. The fruit here is not Veronica, but Peter’s penis, and it difficult not to smile when hearing the lines “Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate:/ […] Greedily she engorged without restraint” (IX.781-791). Arguably, then, Veronica is the agent of the fall – both her pleasing looks tempting Peter to be unfaithful, and it is the sexual acts she performs with Peter that make up the fall.

From the above, it could be argued that the play is sexist against Veronica – making her the sole blame for Peter’s downfall. The play may be using Milton’s text in this way, allowing Milton’s words to present the masculine outlook on the affair. However, this is balanced in the modern script. Veronica very much leads the modern dialogue, especially at the end of the play. It is Veronica who ends the affair, realising that Peter will never leave his wife for her, and that any dreams she had of marrying him and having a happy life are shattered. Inevitably, she blames her own financial and emotional destruction on him. Through the use of PL, the audience hears Peter’s argument, focussing on the woman as object of temptation, but through Veronica’s lines, the audience hears that Peter is just as responsible as Veronica. Looking at Milton’s text, the fall affects both Adam and Eve, Adam as head and leader of the woman also bearing the brunt of disobedience. In this modern adaptation, using the text as a one-sided argument presents how modern (and fallen) relationships do not necessarily end with unity through sin, but that unless responsibility comes from both parties, there will always be separation.