Venus & Adonis
Arts Theatre Cambridge
June 9, 2026
Imagine a warm breeze enveloping you with evocative music and sensual poetry, carrying you, lulled, into a dream-land full of beauty, humour and multi-layered storytelling, for a blissful hour.
That’s what this highly entertaining revival of Greg Doran’s 2004 RSC production does. It coquettishly – shamelessly – seduces you, and (unlike Adonis) I am powerless to resist. It’s a beguiling delight for the eyes, ears, heart, imagination and intellect.
Dressed in black, national treasure Simon Russell Beale (narrator) and RSC stalwart guitarist Nick Lee flank the Arts Theatre forestage. Behind them, there’s a puppet theatre, framed with sumptuous curtains, another stage within and a cyclorama at the back. It’s a clever concept that encourages you to consider the many layers of storytelling: Beale is live, speaking words penned by Shakespeare 400 years ago; the words belong Venus and Adonis, recorded more than 1,500 years previously, in Ovid’sMetamorphoses, itself after the Roman mythical tale.
The tale is, of course, perennially told: love, rejection, pain, loss. This version, Venus & Adonis the narrative poem, was written by Shakespeare in that other plague-induced lockdown (1592) and was more commercially successful than any of his plays, during his lifetime.
Venus, Roman goddess of love, comes upon the mortally gorgeous Adonis in a wood and embarks upon her practised, hitherto highly successful seduction routine – and it’s extremely funny. The five supremely skilled puppeteers are awe-inspiring in their harmony, timing, nuance, and humour, as they conjure the subtlest of movements from the Japanese Bunraku-inspired puppets. The physicality and character with which they imbue the puppets truly make them live and breathe. I did not expect to laugh so much! Who’d have thought a thwarted seduction could be so entertaining? Venus highlights her comely curves, yanks the object of her desire from his horse, before her puppet hand travels alluringly up his puppet leg (all to Lee’s romantic guitar) only to be slapped away with a squeal from Adonis as she locks in on her target.
Adonis, in his “unripe years”, doesn’t want to be “known” until he knows himself. He’d rather hunt boar so rejects Venus’ bombardment of kisses and arguments for love.
Shakespeare’s poetry is of course as beautiful as it is technically proficient; his knack for turning complex human emotions and behaviour into a pithy phrase never clearer:
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.
The language oozes imagery – the lengthy description of the boar’s grotesquery and terror is illustrated perfectly by a genuinely scary shadow play – while clever reversals highlight key themes.
For a one-hour show, a good chunk of time (and delight) is spent on the, er, horse love story… The successful mating of the beasts compounds Venus’ frustration at her failed seduction and the contrast is just hilarious.
Attention to detail is everywhere evident: “Rose-cheek’d Adonis” blushes perpetually with “crimson shame”; his boyhood so clear in his attitudes, physicality and ‘voice’. The animal puppets (hare, deer, dogs add to the horses and boar) are utterly charming.
A symbolic Globe at the apex of the puppet theatre’s proscenium arch turns (literally) into an Elizabethan skull, as Venus chides Death, and the audience gasp at what the curtains turn into, in a deeply beautiful, theatrical, magic trick moment that allows Venus to dance, joyfully, with Death, tragically believing her love to have survived.
Upon learning the truth, physicality pauses to allow the language of lament and grief to take centre stage, as Venus prophesies that all love will now be tainted with sorrow, jealousy, mistrust and woe; “‘It shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud”…… “Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end”. And she’s off in her chariot pulled by silver doves, to be sad forever.
It’s a true symphony of a piece – words, music, lights, sound, set and puppets move, weave and blend beautifully together to tell the story. I could listen to Beale read the iTunes terms and conditions: he’d make them meaningful music.
The one drawback of this enchanting production is the physical distance created between the puppets and the audience, owing to the stage within a stage within a stage. This leads to much of the action being far away upstage which, when in miniature to start with, is a shame. The moments when puppets – mostly the animals – briefly share the forestage with Beale and Lee, are impactful and joyous. I’d love more of the performance to take place here.
Despite that one element, the production is as enchanting and beautiful as if Venus herself crafted it. The five puppeteers, Beale and Lee fully deserve the rapturous applause and cheers of “Bravo” that greet them at the show’s close and we awake, back in reality.
