Review: VENUS AND ADONIS, Riverside Studios

It's 1593, theatres in London are closed due to the plague, and William Shakespeare is probably bored and stressed about his future as a playwright. He dedicates a frisky poem to the Earl of Southampton. Venus and Adonis tells the story of the goddess of love and her failed seduction of a young man, becoming the Bard's first published work. Against a bucolic scene, Shakespeare details the woes of unrequited feelings, lust, and man's relationship with nature. Christopher Hunter has adapted it into a one-man show directed by David Salter.

Hunter sits on a distressed wooden bench, back to the crowd, crumpled up pieces of paper on the floor, a briefcase with more. He's suited up and appears to be going over something he's written as he starts off. That's all the framing we get. This iteration is a memory test that he aces it without a flinch, but it's difficult to see the reasoning behind the production. Shakespeare's language blooms with gorgeous juxtapositions and rhythm, but Hunter slips into sleazy comedy with a clownish vein.

The eroticism of the poem comes off as vulgar as he infantilises Adonis's reluctance and overplays Venus's adamant advances. While certain imagery is highlighted beautifully ("A lily prison'd in a gaol of snow", for instance) and ambient music soars to lift scattered passages, many of Salter's directing choices are utterly baffling, removing all nuance and subtlety from the text. The end result is an often boring and seldom exciting piece of theatre.

The performance ambles between overly physical and shackled by stillness. Hunter delivers the difference in characters through caricatural vocal modulations, which redundancy adds Venus's excessive flamboyancy in an annoying chain of vapid banality. We come out of it with very little. He is a visibly passionate performer, but his trepidation doesn't truly transfer to the audience. It almost makes us want to ask what exactly is going on. What's with the sudden makeup? Why is he dressed like a businessman with plimsolls? Why is he telling us all this? "So quick bright things come to confusion."

Venus and Adonis runs at Riverside Studios until 21 May.

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