The opening and closing phases of
Christopher Marlowe’s play can stand proudly beside any other
Elizabethan or Jacobean drama... handily, given that this revival
opened on the eve of the big Shakespeare quatercentenary celebrations.
But it doesn’t half sag in the middle, even if (as is increasingly the
case) the comic subplot is binned. Partly, of course, this is the
point: having taken the cataclysmic step of selling his soul to the
devil, Faustus then does nothing with his 24 years of supreme power
before the deal is called in but play silly practical jokes and fart
around for momentary gratification. The thing is, it doesn’t make for
engrossing theatre either.
Jamie Lloyd’s revival sets out to rectify this by replacing that
section in its entirety. Once Faustus seals his infernal pact with
Lucifer’s lieutenant Mephistopheles, it’s off to Vegas as the world’s
most famous and successful magician. This meshes with Lloyd’s
contemporary setting: we first see Faustus in a suburban villa, and the
demons that attend him partake of the grubby imagery of modern everyday
horror, slouching around in stained, off-white underwear and supplying
the damned scholar not with a collection of grimoires but with a
magically endowed copy of
Hello!
magazine. The sexual tension is increased by making both Mephistopheles
and Faustus’ servant Wagner female, and introducing a current of
potential redemption through love suggestive of Goethe’s version of the
tale.
And you know what? It works even less well than all the flippant faff
in the original version. Colin Teevan’s additional material is the
clumsiest stuff I’ve ever seen from this usually fine writer. Kit
Harington is on record as relishing the change from playing Jon Snow in
Game Of Thrones to portraying
Faustus, but his collaboration in this project may rather suggest that,
as Snow’s screen lover repeatedly put it, he knaws noothin’. Jenna
Russell’s Mephistopheles and even Forbes Masson as Lucifer himself
(sorely underused here) exude neither seductive temptation, hellish
authority nor brooding menace. Jade Anouka is short-changed by making
Wagner a mere plot device. September will see the London transfer of
the RSC’s current Stratford production of
Faustus, compared to which, why,
this is hell, and I’m well out of it.
Written for the Financial
Times.