Robert Tanitch reviews the RSC’s Doctor Faustus at the Barbican Theatre, London EC2
Christopher Marlowe’s devilish exercise in blasphemy and necromancy, a classic enactment of sin and damnation, premiered circa 1588 when audiences really did believe in demons, hell and damnation.
Five years later the playwright, an avowed atheist, died in mysterious circumstances, stabbed to death in a drunken brawl in a Deptford pub. He was 29.
Faustus, a student of Divinity, sells his soul to Lucifer in return for 24 years of service from Mephistophilis.
Sandy Grierson and Oliver Ryan share the roles of Faustus and Mephistophilis and there is an extra gimmick. The actors do not know until they are on stage which role they will play. The decision is made by their burning two matches.
The gimmick remains a gimmick. There is nothing in Maria Aberg’s messy and poorly spoken production which develops the idea that the two men are interchangeable or indeed might be one person and two sides of his character.
In Marlowe’s play Faustus is discovered in his library. In this RSC production Sandy Grierson is discovered on a bare stage surrounded by boxes of books.
Oliver Ryan’s Mephistophilis is no magnificent Devil but Lucifer’s minion. His diction is poor. Lucifer is a female prostitute.
The middle section, with its childish pranks with scholars, Pope and Emperor is so crude and so diabolically unfunny that many scholars do not believe that Marlowe can have written it
The singing Seven Deadly Sins make the most impact. They look like something out of a decadent 1930’s Berlin cabaret or a punk band; but even they overstay their welcome.
Helen of Troy, who launched a thousand ships, makes a fleeting appearance. She was once played by Elizabeth Taylor when her husband, Richard Burton, played Faustus. Here Helen is played by a young girl and this makes her extended dance sequence with Faustus weird and paedophilic.
Sandy Grierson is at his best in his final scene when he is running around in circles and scrabbling on the ground, trying to delay his appointment in hell; but he is never a tragic figure and his end unbelievably tame.
The actor with the best diction is Nicholas Lumley who plays Wagner, Faustus’s elderly servant.
To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website
