This summer, the Globe mounted Samuel Adamson’s Gabriel and gave audiences the drama, music, and revelry of London in the 1690s. The play, directed by Dominic Dromgoole, combined the music of Henry Purcell, the world-class trumpeter Alison Balsom, and the dramatic, comedic, and musical turns of a large and talented cast. The audience is treated to an opulent spectacle of many characters, much singing, dirty jokes, earnest monologues, and surprisingly intimate solos.

The connecting thread of the play is trumpeter John Shore, who has recently risen to a court-appointed post, performing as part of an acting troupe and for the Queen herself. John tells us that this is the time of the music of Purcell, and that as a trumpeter, his own life and meaning is bound up with his trumpet. When John plays, he is doubled by Balsom playing a valveless trumpet resembling a very long bugle. Shore then introduces the five-year-old Duke of Gloucester, nephew to Queen Mary, for whom martial music is a distraction from his painful treatment for hydrocephalus, and the play has begun.

Gabriel has been criticized for a lack of coherence. The play is loosely structured and intersperses action with music, each actor playing several parts. It is true that the tone and substance of the scenes vary wildly, and oscillate between stories of past figures – such as the female privateer who petitioned Queen Mary for her rightful prize money – and current action – such as John Shore’s acting troupe and their theft of the score to Purcell’s The Fairy Queen as a way of breaking from the manager who cannot pay them. However, while Gabriel may be a jumble, the overall impression of the play is carefully constructed. The child Duke first elicits laughs as he forces his doctor and menservants to play at soldiers, but the pathos of a lonely child in pain is not far beneath the surface. Throughout, it is the characters that connect the disparate scenes, and Adamson’s attentiveness to many different points of view is admirable.

A vignette that resonated with audience and critic alike is that of Cold Arabella. In her youth, Arabella Hunt married a woman, Amy, who passed as a man. Though happy at their wedding, the marriage was annulled and Amy committed suicide shortly thereafter. Arabella finds solace in the court of Mary, where she performs songs written for men – that is, songs that address a female lover. One of Queen Mary’s frequent requests is Purcell’s ‘Cold and Raw’. The song is haunting and tortured, a lament for a lost lady love, and seems perfectly fitted to Arabella’s cloistered existence. Mary both protects and mocks her through her song choices, but this patronage allows Arabella to abjure the oppressive attention of men. A cock-of-the-walk Lord, whose womanising reputation is on the line, utterly fails to win her. As his techniques slide from suave to desperate, Arabella’s bored face never changes. Jessie Buckley’s Cold Arabella is stoic and wistful, perpetually in the grip of a distant grief. Buckley’s vocal performances are among the best presented and her Arabella has been widely reviewed as one of the better developed and acted characters.

At the Globe, I noticed – on my way out – a tiny notice that “this play includes nudity”. I wish I’d seen that on my way in. Trevor Fox’s Bill Shore (the trumpeter John Shore’s dissolute brother) is, at one point conned out of his clothes and darts through the audience with only his trumpet for modesty. On the side of the stage, a mother claps a hand over her young child’s eyes. Bill’s trumpeting is as braying and uncontrolled as his voice and behaviour. Permanently drunk and stumbling, Bill antagonizes all he meets. Near the end of the play, he cannot grasp the new Purcell piece that John has been tapped to perform. After hearing a snatch, he apes it perfectly for a few bars before it crumbles. When his father belittles him for losing his trumpet (after losing his clothes, Bill allows himself to be conned out of his last possession for the price of a drink), Bill turns on both father and newly respectable brother. “This is my god,” he rasps, indicating his trumpet, “you have to lose it or you become soft, like a child”.

David Nice, of the Arts Desk, thoroughly unimpressed by Gabriel, took as his verdict of the play one of its own lines: “it may suit the crude palates of ruffians, but there’s more tune in the one derisory ditty my flunkey can play… than there is in an entire afternoon of this inflated chronicle of Purcellian shit”. No one would argue that Gabriel was the most sophisticated or subtle of performances, but Nice’s judgement is harsh. The story is of a city’s – and an era’s – relationship with the music of Purcell and the composer himself, and Adamson took pains to show that there was far more to this society than immediately springs to mind. Francis, a garrulous river boatman, regales the troupe – and the audience – with stories of all the noble and famous folk he’s transported. His mate, fed up with the inflated tales, claims to have slept with Francis’ wife. James Garnon, as Francis’ cuckolder, has a gift for forcing out his words with increasing volume and intensity, so that I was weak with laughter as he be llowed, “that’s right Francis, your Joan steered MY enormous pizzle into her welcoming harbour”. Later in the play, however, Francis accuses Joan of infidelity with far less good nature than he showed on the Thames. Francis’ timid, stammering son is so galled by this, having had his hand held in a fire as punishment for rebutting accusations of his father’s infidelity, that he refuses to help when the other boatmen turn on Francis.

It is this yoking of music and light with societal discord that I think has been overlooked in other reviews of this play. The latter portion of the play begins to turn sober. A London woman and her husband suffer a stillbirth, and in grief, the husband savagely rebukes a friend who brings word of Queen Mary’s death – on the very same day – and scoffs at reports of Mary’s dignified last actions. He also belittles the midwife and accuses her of witchcraft. From her able and unsurprised responses to his cruel words, the audience sees that not everything in London at this time was joyous and tuneful.

For all its stumbles, Gabriel is a thoroughly enjoyable play. It is raucous, hilarious, and more than a little dirty. In addition to the Satyr-like goings on of Bill and his trumpet, there is also Kate, an actress who gives lessons in exchange for oral sex, her student who is caught out in the most cringe-inducing manner, and an incident of groping at the performance of The Fairy Queen. A fine lady – played with over-the-top vacancy – upon feeling a hand go up her skirt never thinks that it is going for her purse.

Gabriel gave us true variety through extreme highs of emotion that were both genuine and farcical. It gave us theatricality both antique and modern. The most refined music, trilling from violins and harpsichords, was contrasted with drunken dissipation and what looked like a truly Wagnerian hangover. In a play where all must act, sing and sometimes play, the actors, vocalists, and musicians were, for the most part, of a high calibre. Gabriel is a rich play. Not only in terms of its multitude and variety – its marriage of theatre with music, the bawdy with the sombre, and wordplay with slapstick – but also in terms of its surprising layers of storytelling.

Gabriel by Samuel Adamson was staged at The Globe Theatre in July and August 2013.