FAUSTUS
FAUSTUS, Bell Shakespeare Company + Queensland Theatre Company at the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, July 1-24 2011
Bell Shakespeare Company has a history of shaking up its audiences with startling, provocative and morally sharp edged re-workings of familiar plays. This reinvention of Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus is no exception. Adapted by playwright and director – and immediate past artistic director of QTC –Michael Gow, it’s a thorough scouring of the Faustian literature and imagery from which he’s picked seemingly all the best bits into this new version.
It’s a confronting and often frightening spectacle – for someone who suffered what passed for education in a Catholic convent school. For instance, it’s hard not to cower in one’s seat in expectation of deathly thunderbolts from above as an elegant underworld Mephistophilis (John Bell) disdainfully dares God to react to his playful, knowing blasphemy. So, be warned: the faint-hearted religious may find themselves as similarly exercised as the fabled Lear audient who chastised John Bell for not finding a tasteful way to depict eye gouging.
At just under two fascinating, absorbing hours (no interval) Gow’s Faustus incorporates Goethe's Urfaust in order to restore some balance to Marlowe’s structural nightmare; knowing there’ll be tears before bedtime from the opening minutes would otherwise have a crushing effect on the narrative arc. Consequently Urfaust’s tragic Gretchen (a plausibly schoolgirlish and touching Kathryn Marquet), Faustus’s virgin love interest, adds an important element.
Instant gratification being the false god that it is, however, the brilliant scholar is no sooner up to his neck in a hand picked selection of deadly sins, than dissatisfaction set in. From the moment corruption begins to rust his soul his trajectory is a downward one. His downfall and its inevitability makes it hard not to look about and see how disastrous temptations are playing out all around us. Trading your humanity for the delights of undeserved success is, for instance, something that’s probably troubling many members of England’s House of Commons right now. And they’re not the only ones.
As Faustus, Ben Winspear is an attractive, compelling figure for whom the warning “be careful what you wish for” was surely devised. He is so confident of his own powers and heedless of the danger of that confidence it’s obvious that Gretchen has not a hope of escape. For their part, Vanessa Downing’s power-dressed minx Hecate, Catherine Terracini's sizzling sex kitten Belzebub and Jason Klarwein’s irresistibly tempting Lucifer make Faustus’s final destination a lay down misère.
Marlowe’s play is one of those tagged “rarely performed” and that’s probably because it’s reasonably unperformable, as it reads. It highlights, however, the zest and wit adapter Michael Gow has injected via the value-added extras. Philharmonia Choir member Vanessa Downing sings a Schubert lied of such sweetness that Faustus’s darker deeds are somehow momentarily lit by a glow of poignancy. Fragments of poetry – as well as Marlowe’s own: Milton, Dryden and Donne and the King James Bible – enliven the otherwise relentless descent to Hell as does a surprising amount of laugh-out-loud comedy.
The shock and awe elements are not confined to scaring the bejasus out of lapsed Catholics: visually the production is exciting with grotesque masks, hideous puppets and other touches of medieval mummery (set design Jonathan Oxlade, mask maker Tiffany Beckwith-Skinner). The set is a series of rough scaffolding frames that give the stage depth and a series of tatty curtains and screens: Hell is not Better Homes and Gardens, that’s for sure.
Faustus is storytelling for grown-ups and is chock-full of moral and amoral bon bons, excellent jokes and horrifying imagery. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions – most of which seem to have been gathered up into this production and the outcome is a rare and ripping entertainment. The question and answer are not “would you sell your soul?”, but rather “how much?” Recommended.
