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Jack Shepherd’s revived 1989 work is a stylish account of the meeting of two brilliant minds in a south London garden, as all around them the world is swept up in revolutionary fervour.
The year is 1789 and frustrated artist William Blake (Tom Mothersdale) is halfway up a tree with his comely wife Kate (the divine Melody Grove), their naked chit-chat interspersed with grandiloquent quotes from his own work ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’.
Their edenic idyll is interrupted by the grizzled, tricorn-hatted figure of US polemicist and pariah Thomas Paine (Christopher Hunter) wandering into the garden seeking sanctuary and a large brandy. His stunned reaction to their state of undress establishes Paine, despite his famous yen for iconoclasm, as something of a conservative.
Out of good manners the Blakes put some clothes on and the two great men break bread around a simple table, beginning the socratic dialogue around which the play revolves.
Rather than a straightforward ding-dong between the hippy and the gentleman, Shepherd offers a nuanced and wide-ranging discourse on the shape of things to come. Mothersdale and Hunter offer lively performances befitting two firebrands battling on the cusp of a brave new world. Remember that at this point, modern principles of liberty, egalitarianism and the ‘Rights of Man’ (the title of Paine’s incendiary 1791 book) were still nebulous, and by no means foregone conclusions.
Maybe it was Michael Kingsbury’s direction, but more than anything I was reminded of Russell Brand’s recent clash with Jeremy Paxman. Both astute observers of human affairs, in the play Blake (Brand) represents the archetypal anarchist, all metaphysical asides and ‘tear the bastards down’, while Paine (Paxman) plays the pragmatic reformer, expounding the virtues of robust institutions buttressed by democracy and the rule of law.
If you like big ideas and you know a little of the background this is a hoot; like all the best debates neither side entirely gets the upper hand, but they knock seven bells out of each other along the way. Ruth Sutcliffe’s sylvan set design evokes serene purity and timelessness, and only towards the very end does the real moral of the story dawn on us: for all the men’s high-minded talk of a new start for humanity, they’re content to ignore meek Mrs Blake, her sex condemned to faff and fuss and fill men’s glasses for well over a century to come