Comus, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

For radical new artistic director of the Globe Emma Rice, Milton’s masque Comus might strike you as an odd choice. She arrived at the Globe with a riotous mix of Shakespearean text and fun modern flashes of Beyoncé and Bowie.

So plumping for a play whose plot is driven by patriarchal values and written by the famously ill-tempered and Puritanical John Milton is perhaps surprising. Comus, which identifies as ‘a masque in honour of chastity’, tells the story of a young woman lost in a labyrinthine forest, whose wellbeing depends on her ability to resist arousal and who is eventually saved by her two macho brothers.

Not to say that with great direction and a radical re-visioning Milton’s work cannot be updated and sexed-up as Ben Duke's interpretation of Milton's more famous work Paradise Lost proves. And with the maverick director Lucy Bailey’s history of visionary and illuminating productions of Titus Andronicus (2014) and Macbeth (2010) at the Globe, as well as her striking RSC production of The Taming of the Shrew (2012) where the whole stage was turned into a gigantic bed, we trust that Comus is in very capable hands.

Reservations about the play can be swept aside: a visionary director and the charming location of the candle-lit Sam Wanamaker theatre should bring this tricky literary work to vibrant life.