It could be the fall-out from a particularly seedy student party. But it is, in fact, a show called The A-Z of Drugs, playing at the London Comedy Festival last week. She stops you from feeling that the most public spirited course for Adam and Eve after the fall would have been practising vigilant contraception.n In rep Booking: 0171-638 8891PAUL TAYLOR. A wide-eyed girl at the back is popping some Fantasy, while a dude in a manky greatcoat pulls forlornly on a green pepper. There’s a hippy clinging to his seat as the high from a Jack-in-the-Box (“It’ll take your lid off”) threatens to propel him from the room. “I never/ As yet have bow’d unto my father’s God/…Why should I bow to thee?” He also spots the chink in this being’s armour. Lucifer has an intellectual sympathy for the young man to the extent of saying that, if he had been the Creator, he “would not have made thee what thou art”, but Cain’s questions about love put him on the defensive.

“I pity thee who lovest what must perish,” announces this fallen angel, to which Cain pointedly replies “And I thee, who lovest nothing”.As Adah, the adored sister-wife, Thusitha Jayasundera attractively embodies the case for simple piety and strong family ties. This is no adolescent brat whinging that he never asked to be born, but a youth in genuine philosophic turmoil, who, you believe, would lay down his life to bring his brother back. Admirably, he refuses to be tricked into worshipping John Carlisle’s Lucifer, a lordly figure in a pale-grey frock coat and cravat and he registers the oddness of Lucifer asking for this treatment, given his opposition to the tyranny of God. This scene gives way smoothly to Byron’s drama, which begins with the already mutinous Cain refusing to join in family prayers and ends, after the murder of Abel, with his rejection by all his kin save his sister-wife Adah. The heart of the play consists, though, in a long theological discussion between Cain and Lucifer who, in Byron’s account, is quite distinct from the serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden and therefore less compromised in his dealings with mankind. He takes the youth on a cosmic journey, the immensity of which is suggested here with magically simple effects – the protagonist, arms stretched upward, twisting in a shaft of light; the post-lapsarian cracks in the stone floor suddenly irradiated, turning earth to sky.Marcus D’Amico’s Cain has a captivating straightforwardness and integrity. Seated round a camp fire, they listen as a white- bearded Griffith Jones reads the opening of Genesis.

With Dennis Potter’s Son of Man already in the repertoire, this means that the RSC now has an inspired pairing of works that provoked cries of blasphemy on their first appearance.
Barton’s version begins with a group of people who look like Victorian- style New Age travellers. His play on the subject was not intended for performance, being better suited (he maintained) to “mental theatre”. Through his engrossing, finely judged RSC production in the Pit, John Barton, a director temperamentally drawn to plays that benefit from a little adapting, proves that Cain works on the stage as well as on the page. Cain’s proud discontent had a strong intuitive appeal for the untoadying, rebellious spirit of Lord Byron. After all, why should you obey parents whose own primal disobedience has had such spectacularly catastrophic results: expulsion from Eden and the infliction of the painful penalties on all future generations? And why should you respect, still less worship, a God who imagines that it is perfectly just to punish people who weren’t even born when the sin was committed.

To be, like Cain, the first-born child of the first man and woman on earth, is to suffer from a distinct shortage of inspiring role models. Like a solution solidifying around a seed crystal, Rattle and the orchestra supported and ornamented a deeply touching account of this most deeply touching of songs.JAN SMACZNY. Hampson floated his tone with a delicacy that would have made the most distinguished contralto proud. With the cathedral haze that had benefited Vaughan Williams removed, the players opted for super-real clarity. This meant lots of marvellous detail, but it was delivered with a verve that often submerged the singers.”Der Abschied” was a different matter. Part of the problem for Thomas Hampson and John Mitchinson, gallantly standing in for an indisposed Peter Seiffert, was that the orchestra was on a bit of a spree.

I felt some sympathy with these sybarites in the early songs, but in the massive final “Abschied” all doubts melted away. High on my list was Tippett’s A Midsummer Marriage, but perhaps more fundamental to its phylogeny was the organic growth of Sibelius. Underlying the detail, all of which was ear-catching and grateful, was a sense of deeper structure. That it did not quite arrive by the end echoed the composer’s own feeling that Forest is the introduction to a much longer work.Those who take the view that Das Lied von der Erde with a baritone rather than a contralto is a bit like strawberries without the cream should have been present on Wednesday night. A good part of the latter was supplied by Symphony Hall’s acoustic chambers which, wide open, gave the kind of “sustaining pedal” ambience common in the best English cathedrals. While the acoustic of the building kept Vaughan Williams’s textures vibrating in the air, the strings provided a balance between precisely placed chords, unanimous rubato and passionate solos.The wit in placing the Fantasia before Judith Weir’s Forest was that the new work seemed rooted in the same mulch as the Vaughan Williams. Growing out of some consonant string solos, Weir’s piece gave glimpses of the elemental qualities that draw together such places of contemplation as forests and cathedrals.