The foyer displays advertising Rupert
Goold's re-branding of the Oxford Stage Company as Headlong Theatre may
be ungrammatical to the point of illiteracy, but by gum, it's living up
to its new name. A rare revival of Edward Bond's Brechtian satire
Restoration is now followed by this
revival of Goold's 2004 Northampton production of his and Ben Power's
treatment of Christopher Marlowe's best-known play. It divided critical
opinion then and no doubt will now, but I love it.
The posters ascribe the play to "Christopher Marlowe and other hands",
a knowing nod to both form and subject of this version. The main strand
of Marlowe's play has been intertwined with a series of scenes
concerning Brit-art provocateurs Jake and Dinos Chapman's 2003
"rectification" of Francisco Goya's etchings
Disasters Of War by putting clowns'
and puppies' heads on the figures in Goya's grotesque tableaux of
carnage. As the Chapmans to Goya, so Goold and Power to Marlowe: the
lines and power of the original can be seen along with the cheeky
contemporary additions. As Faustus (Scott Handy) is led astray by
Mephistopheles (Jake Maskall), so the Chapmans (Stephen Noonan as Jake
and Jonjo O'Neill as Dinos) alternate as each other's tempter. Can
artistic celebrity be compared to selling one's soul for power and
fortune? In this case, it can. Goold and Power make clear the parallel
that each narrative involves a conscious decision to blaspheme: in the
literal sense when Faustus signs his soul away to Lucifer, and against
a modern artistic "theology" when the Chapmans issue their conceptual
challenge. The motif of Hell crosses boundaries, too, as
Mephistopheles' realm of the damned is compared with the Chapmans' 2001
installation entitled
Hell
(which, we are reminded, was itself destroyed in a warehouse fire in
2004).
It's all dazzlingly clever in the best sense of the word. Every time an
over-emphatic note is struck, such as an Afghan camerawoman telling
Jake the too-sententious story of the Taliban's destruction of the
Bamiyan Buddhas, another chime of beautiful audacity sounds, as when a
figure of the Pope felled by a meteorite in Maurizio Catalan's
sculpture
La Nona Ora gets to
his feet to become the Pope who is mocked by an invisible Faustus. Mark
Lockyer turns in a wicked parody of art pundit Matthew Collings, into
the bargain. The final irony is that the Hampstead Theatre has a foyer
exhibition of other Chapman "rectifications" of Goya, which are
revealed as banal and trivial. This play, though, is anything but: far
from being navel-gazing conceptual art, it told me more about our
individual response to the enormity of war than the entire evening of
plays and discussion about Darfur that I had seen 24 hours earlier.
Written for the Financial Times.