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COMUS

As part of the John Milton 400th Anniversary Celebrations at Christ's College, there was a rare opportunity to see a live performance of Milton's 1634 masque Comus, along with a newly commissioned 'anti-masque' by Australian poet John Kinsella, which reworked Milton's original in relation to contemporary issues.

A masque is a Renaissance form of drama involving acting, music and dancing, often an elaborate, spectacular performance for the royal court. (One might almost call it a seventeenth-century musical.) Milton's masque was a smaller scale affair performed at Ludlow Castle for the new Earl of Bridgewater, and uses a dramatic form usually associated with extravagance and excess to tell a story about chastity and virtue. The tension between extravagance and moderation was exemplified by, on the one hand, having a small cast centring on three of the earl's children, and on the other hand, by having songs written by the king's musician Henry Lawes.

This is not the first time that Milton's Comus has been performed at Christ's – as part of the tercentenary celebrations for Milton in 1908, the Marlowe Society staged the piece. Several students involved in this production later rose to an eminent place in history, including the poet Rupert Brooke, who directed the piece, and the mountaineer George Mallory, who was a morris-dancing chorus member.

The 1908 production aimed to strip away some of the adaptations which Milton's Comus had undergone in earlier performances, in order to create a performance more closely resembling the original. The 2008 production followed in these footsteps in its staging of Milton's work, for instance, by using Lawes's original music, whilst giving space for a contemporary adaptation of Milton's work with the addition of John Kinsella's reply.

In 1908 there were no college dramatic societies, hence the Marlowe Society being responsible for the performance. This time round it seemed fitting for Christ's own drama society (CADS) to stage Milton's Comus, while the Marlowe had the challenge of staging the premiere of an innovative new piece of verse drama, in which John Kinsella reworks Milton's spectacle in praise of chastity to engage contemporary environmental concerns.

While the actors in these two pieces were current Cambridge students, the production teams included theatre professionals, such as Christ's alumni Annilese Miskimmon and Lachlan Goudie. There were three performances in Christ's College Fellows' Garden and two in the college's old Hall. Annilese, an English graduate of the college and Artistic Director of Opera Theatre Company Ireland, commented:

"Having two settings makes things difficult in one way, but it also releases you from the kind of constraints you'd have putting something like this on in a traditional theatre. I think it will be magical in the garden, and then when it goes to Hall, it will be in exactly the kind of space it was originally written for. Both are exciting."

There is more information about Comus, past and present, in the souvenir programme - further details here.

Performance details

Christ's College, St Andrew's Street, Cambridge, in the Fellows' Garden on 19, 20, 21 June, and in Hall on 22, 24 June 2008, at 8 pm.

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