Times, 28 September, by Jeremy Kingston.
"Byronic twist to the Bible"
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Theatre: "Cain" revived at the Minerva in Chichester. 

Because the press were invited to the third of only four 
performances of Lord Byron's drama, this notice will appear 
after the play closes, which is a pity, since Edward Hall's 
animating production invigorates some knotty speeches of 
compressed theology and draws exceptional playing in the 
principle roles of Lucifer, Cain and Cain's anguished wife 
Adah. Even so, the short run is four performances longer 
than any previous professional production in this country. 
(Its first ever staging was in Russia, when Stanislavsky 
selected it to re-open the Moscow Arts Theatre after the 
October Revolution. A rum choice.) 

Byron's popular reputation still being what it is, Byronic, 
his Cain might be expected to come across as a disdainful 
rebel, seething in discontent. There is something of this in 
the aggressive wording of his prayer to Jehovah above the 
altar of first fruits, but in the context, following Abel's 
abject humility, it is clear that a man who has brooded over 
the human plight cannot speak otherwise. He has moved a 
short but significant distance from sensing difference to 
acting upon it. 

The interesting feature of this is that Samuel West shows 
Cain recapturing, in the scene following the murder, a 
youthful innocence that he must have lost long before the 
play begins. The burden of puzzlement, expressed through 
piercing stares at his dutifully worshipping family, has 
lifted with his crime. Another burden is taking its place, 
but this will be one he can understand. 

Hall's odd notion of the Angel of the Lord, a school marmy 
type in white, snakelike sleeves, brings the only false note 
to his conception of the drama. The weight of resisting 
Lucifer rests upon Maria Miles's unafraid Adah. ''I cannot 
answer this immortal thing,'' she tells Cain, giving the 
line a smile of worried joy, positive in the love she feels 
no urge to question. 

Lucifer's entrance is a coup de theatre, raising himself 
from the mound at the centre of Alice Normington's set, a 
saucer of golden sand filling the stage. His slow emergence 
and the flexing of his limbs occupies the time of Cain's 
wondering speech, illustrating Hall's concern to provide 
something to look at when Byron is overdoing the adjectives. 
With his young body, ageless face and grey hair, Alexis 
Denisof is an uncanny presence. Never raising his voice, nor 
smiling, murmuring his ironic questions and giving 
mysterious weight to his oft-repeated ''I'', he coolly 
inhabits the two worlds of physical and supernatural.



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