Of all epics, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene seems the most difficult to dramatise: it is long, intricate, philosophical and allegorical. Aristotle considered epic and drama essentially the same: indeed, Milton’s Paradise Lost was originally conceived as a play. Epic poetry and theatre are linked, and yet we rarely think of the two in relation to each other, and even less often do we witness a stage production of an epic poem.
The audience at the Burton Taylor were lucky, then, to witness a performance of Simon Palfrey’s adaptation of The Faerie Queene, titled Demons’ Land. Palfrey’s response to the task of dramatising this epic is to re-imagine it, placing Fairy Land in a Tasmania populated by characters both familiar and harrowingly unfamiliar. The play draws on Spenser in an extraordinary fashion, while also creating its own, new theatrical world.
Two heroes of the poem star in the play, the Redcrosse Knight, also known as St George, here rechristened Red, and Britomart, the female knight of Britain, here, British Palfrey prefaced the performance, which hovered between a full staging and a reading, by noting that one need not know the poem to enjoy the play- indeed, that it might be better if one did not. This is certainly true. It is as if the entirety of The Faerie Queene has been placed in a blender at a very high speed, with a number of other things thrown in. I thought sometimes of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker, which similarly dashes from one extreme of abject poetising to dramatic heights and back.
The play was nearly two and a half hours long, and could use some cuts or an interval. Nevertheless, its length reflects the challenge of getting epic bigness onto the stage, and intensifies the feeling it leaves us with. In the beginning, the language was so dense I felt alienated and disorientated in this new world, but eventually I slipped into its flow. The cast was wonderful through and through, especially Cupid. There is some great pathos in watching a sad old character such as the Collector rail on about youth, but these very human or emotional moments punctuate the darkness. It is a very funny play, and also a very sexy play. But nevertheless, I think Palfrey wants to ask the same sort of big questions that make us still want to read The Faerie Queene today: what is providence? How does it touch us? How do we realise ourselves, maybe change ourselves, find virtue? These are still open for debate.
