The Guardian, 28 September, by Michael Billington.
"Chichester: Cain"
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Byron's "Cain" has had some persuasive advocates. 
Stanislavski staged it in 1920 to an enthralled working-
class audience. George Steiner called it one of Byron's 
"vast, epic presentations of the mystery of evil". V S 
Pritchett has written of its "haunting private despair". But 
it has hardly ever been seen on the British stage until 
Edward Hall's excellent revival at the Minerva Theatre, 
Chichester: living proof that Byron was a pathfinding 
dramatist. 

The poet, writing in 1821, dubbed the play "a mystery" in 
the medieval sense. But what is extraordinary is its 
profound personal desperation. Cain, questing for knowledge, 
is taken by Lucifer on a conducted tour of Hades where he 
discovers that death is inseparable from life, evil 
indissoluble from good. This knowledge leads him, on his 
return to earth, to threaten to dash his son Enoch against 
the rocks (on the grounds that "the germs of an eternal 
misery to myriads is within him!") and to kill his brother, 
Abel. 

Byron invests the stark facts of Genesis with a deeply 
autobiographical pain: when Cain asks Lucifer, "Why do I 
exist? Why art THOU wretched? Why are all things so?", you 
hear the poet wrestling with his own savage demons. In the 
light of his own relationship with Augusta Leigh, it is also 
fascinating to hear Cain's wife-sister, Adah, championing 
the perfect purity of incestuous love. But what is really 
startling is the way Byron, while inheriting the medieval 
form, invents the drama of the future: one that combines 
Absurdist despair with total spatial freedom. 

Mr Hall stages the play very simply in a circular sandpit, 
surrounded with guttering candles, rightly allowing the 
language to conjure up the fantastic effects such as a 
journey through the abyss of space. Samuel West's Cain 
admirably combines insatiable intellectual hunger with a 
moving regret for paradise lost ("the sun's gorgeous coming 
- his setting indescribable"); Alexis Denisof's semi-naked 
Lucifer has a fallen-angel luminosity; and there is sterling 
support from Maria Miles as a tearful Adah and Kate O'Mara 
as a cursing Eve. 

Now Cain has made its mark, how about a season at the 
Minerva of neglected plays by the great 19th-century poets? 



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