Lost Dog is an award-winning dance/theatre company based in rural East Sussex and led by director/choreographer Ben Duke. They treasure and celebrate the temporary community that is created when people share time, space and air in a theatre - whether that theatre is a village hall or a major metropolitan opera house. Their works on stage defy categorisation but at their heart there is usually a familiar story or (often venerated) classic text which is retold, re-imagined or reinvented through words, music and movement.

The company is set to tour Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me) through house this autumn, opening at Artsdepot, North London on the 10 October.

The show is a re-telling of the story of the beginning of everything inspired by Milton’s epic poem – told through words, music and the easily misunderstood medium of dance.

A show for anyone who has ever created anything (a child, a garden, a paper aeroplane) and then had to watch that wonderful thing spiral out of control.

We talk to Co-Directors Ben Duke and Lucy Morrison and performer Sharif Afifi ahead of the start of the tour.

Images of the company in rehearsals: Zoe Manders

What can audiences expect from this piece?

Ben:"Paradise Lost is a one man show, a one man dance theatre piece that tells the story of the creation of the universe and Adam and Eve. And it's a massive, epic story with the domestic, ridiculous and funny experience of being human, alongside the kind of profound and the universal. So it's trying to hold those two things together."

Sharif:"Expect the unexpected. I think the beauty of the show is that it inhabits many forms and it develops in a way that you don't always know what you're following and you don't know what to expect next. I think that's the beauty of it, it keeps you on your toes."

Lucy:"It has its own kind of energy and pace and thought process. And it’s quite surprising in structure. I think what we probably could say is that audiences can expect big storytelling in a human way."

Sharif:"Yeah, big storytelling told in a very human way. That's it – it’s a piece about very big, universal ideas explored in a very sort of small, human and unexpected way."

Lucy:"I think my image for the show, the feeling of it is a bit like a balloon that's kind of up in the air somewhere, but it's tethered by this one man who's just trying to work things out on a really, really human level; but there's an idea hovering above it which is bigger and more expansive."

Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me) is inspired by Milton’s epic poem, a re-telling of the story of the fall from grace of Adam and Eve. What was the biggest challenge in staging this as a one man show?

Ben:"The biggest challenge I suppose is the most obvious one of the scale of the story and the scale of the whole - it's about the creation of the universe. It’s got this kind of battle between Angels - the whole thing is far too big for one person to try and stage. So I think that was the endless challenge, but that was built into the whole problem of it, of like, how do we deal with the limitations of ourselves, the limitations of theatre? And so, that was a challenge, but that was also hard baked into the concept. It was both a challenge and also something that I had to keep going, yes! that's it, that’s what I've set up. That's what we're trying to deal with."

Olivier award nominee Sharif Afifi (The Band’s Visit, My Fair Lady, Hadestown) will be playing all the characters from God, to Adam & Eve and Lucifer in Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me) touring this Autumn. What are you most excited about seeing from him in this role?

Lucy:"It’s been really fun watching him jump in and out of all the characters, God, Lucifer, Adam, Eve, himself. And I guess the other character in this piece is the audience, and I think that's what we're having lots of fun with in rehearsals, exploring all the possibilities within the text."

"But there's a layer of this piece that is a really direct communication with the audience, and that’s what I'm really excited to see - how that's going to affect Sharif and the decisions that we've made - that liveness of being with an audience and this piece really leans into the fact that he's one man on stage with pretty much nothing but him and the audience and the story and his imagination."

"So, I'm really excited to see that connection, that's the sort of final piece, and see where that takes Sharif within the decisions that we've made together."

This tour will be co-directed by Lost Dog’s Artistic Director Ben Duke and Lucy Morrison (Royal Court, Clean Break). Can you tell us about the collaboration?

Ben:"It's been great working with Lucy. I met Lucy a long time ago when we collaborated on a show called Like Rabbits at The Almeida festival. And then I worked with her on a project that I did with the writer Lucy Kirkwood. I feel like I set out to make this piece of dance and ended up making a piece of theatre. And then in the process of putting it back together, I felt like we really needed some theatre expertise and that's what Lucy brings to it and it's been amazing to have her in the room and to see a different approach and really digging into the detail of it has been amazing."

Lucy:"I wanted to collaborate with Ben on this show mainly because I saw the show back in probably 2015 and I have a really gorgeous, impressionistic memory of it. So when Ben approached me because he wanted to recast it, it just felt like a really exciting way to work with Ben and to have a sense of what the show was in my kind of mystery memory."

"Like Rabbits was a very natural collaboration that came about quite spontaneously and when those collaborations work really well, you kind of think, oh, something will come along again, in a kind of natural form. And this felt like a natural way for us to work together again."

Lucy:"It's been really fun, and there's been a lot of laughter and also lots of really deep questioning around what Ben was intending when he came up with the piece. One of the highlights has been when we’ve asked Ben to go into his internal world to describe the choreography of a particular set movement section and I think halfway through we were doing that, Ben just turned to me and went, “I didn't really ever think I'd have to explain this to anyone” and that was just a really gorgeous moment where a creator really lets you in on where those things came from, honestly, and are all the more beautiful for it."

Can you tell us more about the emotional arc of the show?

Lucy:"I think the piece is unexpectedly funny and sad and it does it rather brilliantly. It doesn't set out to do either of those things, but along the way there are just moments that have that feeling to them; of suddenly going deeper, or suddenly being unexpectedly light."

Sharif: "It really navigates a beautiful course of human emotion and just again, takes very big ideas and shows how they move a person through their life or through a crisis, which in my mind, the character within this piece is experiencing and we get to see how that evolves in the form of joy or sadness or levity or something being incredibly ridiculous. It moves through all of that and so the piece keeps changing. I think that it's an exciting watch in that sense, because there's a bit of everything in there."

Lucy:"I also think it's playful in a way that I think theatre should be, you know, play - it's about play. And I love that Ben's really leaned into that in a way that has a kind of young boy's imagination somewhere inside of it, that then expands and his experience as an adult man and how his relationship with that kind of boyish imagination."

We’d love to know what touring to different scale venues in the South East means to the company with its rich history in rural touring?

Ben:"It feels important to have a show that can go into different kinds of venues, to have a show that's flexible and it's not always possible you know - certain shows are the size they are, and Paradise Lost can expand and contract according to the venue."

"I really enjoy that about this piece of work that it can fit into unusual spaces as well as into more traditional spaces, and particularly the rural places, that idea of people coming to see the work that they might not choose to otherwise, unless it happens to be right there in their local town or village hall. Yeah, that feels important to me and to us as a company."

What are you most looking forward to seeing/experiencing from the show?

Sharif:"I'm really excited for the level of unpredictability performing this will bring. The other character in the show is the audience, so I think for me, I'm just most excited to see how it's going to vary from show to show. We're cultivating it in rehearsals, but there is the reality that it's going to change every time I do it, and that scares me to death, but it's also what makes it exciting."

What’s it been like working on the show?

Sharif:"Working on the show has been intense but very rewarding. It's just three of us in a room, which is really fun but I’m also working with the person who made the show, no pressure! And so that's brought a real kind of joy, feeling like you've been trusted to reimagine something that somebody else has made and brought out of themselves. The three of us get on so well, and so having a gorgeous, safe space to create like that, honestly it can be quite rare, and is a huge gift. But I've loved being given something that I know works, because Ben got to explore that already and has refined it, and then seeing how we can stretch the edges of that even further and find out how it can live as something new. Being able to actually challenge his idea of what the show is, is really thrilling, because that's what gives it this kind of aliveness. Because all three of us are like, what is this version of it? So that's been quite fun for me."

Can you tell us more about how it’s been adapting such a historic piece of literature by Milton?

Sharif:"It’s cool to be exploring such a well known piece of literature and trying to make something new out of it, because I think the most exciting thing is that it's taken that and its ideas and its themes and it's made it incredibly relatable, being able to do that, I think, is the marker of really any good piece of literature or classic text that stands the test of time. Exploring how it has continued to live for the character in the piece is where you find it’s universality. Finding that in this very small human story, these really grand ideas in this beautiful piece of text, finding how we can interweave those things, has just been so much fun."