Byron Journal (21) 115-116, 1993, by Edward Burns
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Byron's Cain: The Minerva Theatre, Chichester, September 24, 
1992.

The Minerva Theatre is the studio theatre of the Chichester 
Festival, roomy and comfortable as these things go. It 
provides the chance, albeit on this occasion for four nights 
only, for junior members of the company to present less 
obviously commercial work than that which provides the bread 
and butter of the Festival itself. Byron's "Cain" is, 
perhaps paradoxically, an apt choice for this kind of 
enterprise; a studio environment focusses the theatrical 
imagination in a way which can only benefit a play whose 
theatrical demands seem to rush towards the impossible, and 
the intelligence and energy of a comparatively untried cast 
give the necessary edge to what remains a startlingly 
unhackneyed rethinking of the theatrical.

Edward Hall, the director, and his designer Alice 
Normington, set the play on a heap of sand, lit initially by 
flickering candles held by the cast, and which the audience 
surrounded on all sides. The sense of ritual gave valuable 
help in establishing the dignity of the first family, at the 
prayers which open the play. Indeed Cain (Samuel West) 
seemed initially lacking in the force to break through and 
rebel against the patriarchal word. On the emergence of 
Lucifer, the performance warmed, as it should, in growing 
confidence and self-recognition. Alexis Denisof emerged, in 
a parody of the creation of Adam, from the centre of the 
heap of sand, a handsome, near-naked figure, with a 
chillingly classical demeanour. His mocking refusal of 
Cain's need for fellowship was exactly right, although--and 
this seemed true of the production as a whole--the 
circumstances of a prescribed rehearsal and performance 
timetable seem not to have left time for the relationship to 
develop with the subtlety it promised.

More intriguingly, this theatrical moment echoed Byron's 
later "The Deform'd Transformed" in which the Stranger 
performs an act of blasphemous, implicitly homoerotic 
creation, in fashioning an "Achilles" from the red dust. 
One's main regret for this production was the lack of 
opportunity to follow up and develop a vein of stage imagery 
to articulate those Byronic concerns with which cast and 
director were clearly in tune. The second act, the descent 
into "the abyss of Space" was severely truncated--no pre-
Adamites, no mammoths, just blue light, and a splurge of 
smoke. Again, West and Denisof gave a tantalizing sense here 
of unfulfilled promise, the questioning self-consciousness 
of the one and the contained predatory precision of the 
other giving a sense of what was, in the physical staging, 
frustratingly sketchy. Spectacular effects are not to the 
point here, but a concrete language of desire and terror is-
-it seemed well within these actors' capacity, and I for one 
would have liked to have seen them try to develop it over a 
less severely cut text.

As it was, the emotional focus of the play was fixed largely 
by Maria Miles' Adah. She found a simplicity of feeling, so 
necessary to the beginning-of-world-ness of the language and 
manner of the play, which matched well West's child-like 
directness in his questioning of Lucifer. Indeed, given the 
way the play was reproportioned by the treatment of the 
second act, this relationship emerged as the dramatic 
dynamic, limited only in its effect by the practical 
difficulties of providing the couple with a convincing 
enough baby in so intimate an auditorium. 

Ms. Miles fulfilled one range of possibilities for the 
playing of this kind of text. Another was suggested by the 
alert and generous performance of that star of stage, screen 
and British soap opera, Kate O'Mara, whose Eve had a flair 
for the blood and guts of romantic acting to lift the 
performance as a whole, and to give her climactic curse just 
the panache it needs. Robert Portal's Abel was strong and 
gentle, the murder well enough staged to wrest back one's 
serious attention from a sacrifice that apparently involved 
Cain in trying to set alight a couple of nectarines.

In the end, though, the jury is still out on "Cain"; as a 
piece, that is, for a theatre audience. Hall's production 
coalesced into a series of strong images--some of them, like 
the visual closeness of the icy stylized angel to the look 
of the then absent Lucifer, rather puzzling to an audience 
encountering the play for the first time. A heavily cut Act 
II seems like an evasion of the major issue--how far *does* 
Byron succeed in giving metaphysical speculation concrete 
theatrical form? Perhaps he sets a problem too difficult for 
actors to solve from within the constraints of an 
economically hard-pressed theatrical establishment. 
Chichester are to be congratulated on opening up the 
"Mystery," as Byron termed it, of his most powerful play, 
and if the "mystery" of the stage-worthiness of Byron's 
dramatic corpus still remains, it is not for the want of 
some markedly intelligent acting and directing.



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