Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus has been the inspiration behind countless dramas, cautionary tales, songs and novels. The tale of a man who sells his soul to the Devil, lives the high life and then realises he’s made a terrible mistake crosses many cultural barriers.
QTC and Bell Shakespeare have joined forces to present a new imagining of the popular tale: Michael Gow’s Faustus. Gow took Marlowe’s text, added elements of Wolfgang Von Goethe’s Urfaust, a touch of Milton, Donne and Dryden and even gave Faustus one of Marlowe’s beautiful sonnets to seduce the innocent young Gretchen:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.
(Marlowe: 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love', 1599)
Ben Winspear and Kathryn Marquet as Faustus and GretchenThese are rich and wonderful sources. Some will probably go over your head, but there will be others where you recognise the lines and wrack your memory to find the original. At least that’s how it was for me.
Michael Gow’s concept for staging Faustus is excellent. He presents it as a play within a play, or a series of vignettes. There are nods to early puppet theatre and commedia, shadow puppets, live filming, slides and Berlin cabaret. It’s a rich pastiche of influences and forms, all combined to tell a story of greed, lust and horror.
Jonathon Oxlade’s design comes to the fore and is superb. I loved his demon masks and stages within stages. They worked beautifully with Chris More’s gorgeous video design and Jason Glenwright’s dark and moody lighting. Phil Slade’s composition used old and new Faustian references, including Mahler and Berlioz. The scratching of an old record player was well suited to the travelling show references with the players and props visible back stage. And the eerie sounds of Nazi rallies and speeches suited the megalomaniac fantasies of Faustus and Lucifer.
The cast is uniformly excellent, as you would expect from a co-production between two major companies. Ben Winspear is a young, hungry Faustus, revelling in his power and blind to its implications. He’s more than happy to sell his soul to have the power to command Mephistophilis (John Bell) for 24 years. Bell is wonderfully restrained and subtle as the cold and cunning demon who is quite content to play along with Faustus’ delusions of grandeur.
Kathryn Marquet and John Bell Jason Klarwein brings rock god youth and passion to the devilish role of Lucifer, helped by the glamour and brilliance of Vanessa Downing and Catherine Terracini as Hecate and Belzebub. The trio turn the verse to rich, sweet honey and bedazzle with their sexy antics.
The lost innocent in this scenario is Gretchen, a schoolgirl unfortunate enough to catch the eye of Faustus. Kathryn Marquet is lovely as the awkward schoolgirl, unaware of her own charms until she discovers lust and falls head over heels in love. The scene where she arranges her teddy bears on her bed and covers them with Faustus’ jacket so that she can pretend he’s in the bed with her is so intimate it’s almost uncomfortable to watch.
This production of Faustus has many stunning images that will stay with me. Where it fell down was Faustus' lack of anguish and suffering (surely pivotal to the story) and the unevenness of some of the texts used. The verse goes from Marlowe’s dense original to some fairly clunky rhymes, especially in the scenes between Faustus and Gretchen. (I’m afraid I’m not familiar with Von Goethe’s text and so don’t know whether these were his rhymes or the translation.)
John Bell torments Ben Winspear's FaustusThis is a premiere of a new adaptation, which means that it may just need some time to settle in and get comfortable but I think the text could probably do with a little more pruning. The varied forms experimented with on stage were exciting but some, like the live filming, went on a tad too long.
Faustus is a brave experimental work for two major theatre companies. It’s likely to challenge, alienate and impress audiences in equal measures.
Faustus plays at Brisbane Powerhouse until 26 June, 2011, before touring to Sydney and Wollongong.
