Who is popular today?

Corn Exchange, BrightonEd Hughes and Peter Cant’s chamber opera meditates on literature, aesthetics and theology and boasts John Tomlinson as Milton. But this opera of ideas doesn’t allow us to make out the actual ideasGiven its world premiere at the Brighton festival, Ed Hughes’s chamber opera States of Innocence marks the 350th anniversary of Milton’s death. Setting a libretto by Peter Cant, it dauntingly takes the writing of Paradise Lost as the starting point for a meditation on the relationship between creator and creation in both aesthetics and theology, as well as an interrogation of the poem’s sexual politics. You can’t help but feel it buckles under the weight of the task it sets itself.We see the blind Milton (John Tomlinson, no less) dictating Paradise Lost to his wife (Rozanna Madylus), his assistant (Thomas Elwin) and a group of friends and family, played by a small vocal ensemble. The characters are soon reconfigured as the protagonists of the poem, so Milton becomes God, his wife becomes Eve, and the resentful assistant morphs into Satan. Much is made of inconsistencies in the Book of Genesis as to whether God created Adam and Eve simultaneously, and therefore as equals, or whether Eve was created from Adam and consequently his subordinate. Milton ambivalently accepts the latter, but Cant and Hughes, drawing on a passage from the poem in which Eve gazes at her reflection in water, give her an alter ego called Eve’s Image (Rachel Duckett), who voices the alternative perspective in language drawn from The Woman’s Bible, written in 1895 by the American activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Continue reading...