Poor old Johann Georg Faust (1466-1541) had no idea what he was starting. A hard-working, itinerant mountebank, he trekked around Germany reading horoscopes, doing magic tricks, and selling fake medicine (once being denied entrance to Nuremberg on the basis that he was a ‘great necromancer and sodomite’). He died when one of his own experiments exploded in his face in a pub near Baden- Württemberg. But somehow the legend got started that he’d sold his soul to the devil. And now look.
The Faust parable – a pact that exchanges earthly success for eternal suffering – reaches into our psyches, shows us temptation, and warns us of its consequences. And Western culture has two great dramatic works that tell the story: Goethe’s vast epic Faust and Marlowe’s rather sprightlier five-acter, Dr Faustus. Of the two, I prefer Goethe. His Dr Faustus has noble ideals: he seeks a moment of perfect transcendence that will elevate him from the drudgery of mankind, and this leads to ruin and horrific tragedy, despite his best intentions. By comparison, Marlowe’s Bad Doctor just messes about for 24 years despite knowing exactly what’s going to happen to him in the end, and then complains when he’s dragged to hell at the end.
To be fair, Marlowe’s Faustus is probably closer to real life. Maybe that’s the real tragedy of humanity: we fritter our lives away with trivial nothings – the latest phone, a luxury cruise, sexual temptations – and then we complain when the terminal diagnosis comes. As Woody Allen said, ‘Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering. And it’s all over much too soon’.
But watching Faustus play out his petty pranks often feels tedious. During the course of the performance he plays tricks on the Pope, cheats a horse dealer, and puts on a magic show. Is it worth an eternity of damnation for that? Apart from the opening and closing scenes, which are literally spellbinding, watching Dr Faustus can sometimes feel like an eternity in hell itself.
Seabass Theatre is strangely drawn to great plays with saggy middles. This is their third production, and the first two were Hamlet (famously prone to the criticism that the Prince seems to take forever to get round to killing his evil uncle), and The Tempest, which features about an hour and a half of people wandering around an island before the serious business starts. Next term they’re doing Waiting for Godot, which is almost defined by inactivity. (‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful’, says Estragon.) Have they found the magic ingredient for Dr Faustus?
Director Seb Carrington has certainly showered this production with interesting ideas. While the audience comes in, the cast is enacting a full Latin Compline service, underlining the Christian tradition against which Faustus revolts. As his devil-worshipping takes hold, scenes of mass Nazi rallies appear on a screen at the side of the stage. The same screen frequently shows animated snippets of text taken from contemporary diaries about devil-worship. The Seven Deadly Sins take part in an awkwardly stilted disco dance. The alchemists Cornelius and Valdes, come to tempt Faustus into his unholy invocation, creep across the floor like serpents in the metaphysical Garden of Eden. Vast chunks of the play have been rewritten in modern English. And there’s even a scene of Mephistopheles and Faustus having a full-on snog.
But what do these ideas amount to? The points Carrington is trying to make may be explicable, but you need Carrington there to explain them. They don’t quite manage it by themselves. I’m a sucker for projected Nazis, but exactly what they are doing there I’m not at all sure. Illustrate some sort of link between Faustus’ desire for power and totalitarian dictatorship perhaps? The theme remains obscured behind the effect itself. And once it’s gone, it’s forgotten. Ideas come and go as quickly as Faustus’ own pranks. The tender gay subtext, the dancing sins, the sudden descent into rape at the end, all seem like little islands of original interpretation, without any genuine cohesion.
The modern English is also puzzling. It jars so noticeably with the original text that it must, you feel, be there for a very special thematic reason. I did actually ask Seb Carrington about this, and they told me that they wanted to shorten the central section of the play, so they rewrote it, but couldn’t imitate Marlowe’s words, so used their own instead. In other words: not a thematic decision, just an incredibly conspicuous piece of editing.
The one feature that Carrington uses consistently is the on-screen text, which is almost like a parallel story, taken from a diarist contemporary of Marlowe’s. It’s arch, reflective, fascinating, and has a proper through-line, sustained from start to finish, like the pirate story that runs throughout Watchmen.
It also helps that we can read and understand every word of the on-screen text, because the other overwhelming difficulty with this Dr Faustus is audibility. Even with every actor wearing a microphone, the majority of words are simply impossible to discern. It’s not that they are too quiet, but that the hard, echoing walls of the vast O’Reilly Theatre make them indistinguishable. It’s an ever-present problem in this particular space. Under Milk Wood suffered similarly a couple of weeks ago (although Uncle Vanya was remarkable for its clarity, maybe because the packed audience deadened the echoes). I thought some of the key lines of the play had been cut; Carrington assured me they were still there, but just couldn’t be heard.
There were other technical problems last night, beyond the control of the director: a live camera feed had to be dropped because the camera had run of battery-power. And the cable for one of the ceiling-fitted projectors was loosely gaffer-taped to the wall in a way that any safety officer would be horrified to see. Hopefully these details can be tightened up. Also worth tightening up is the curtain call, which is over-indulgent. It goes on for a full five minutes, with separate groups of actors coming on individually, and bowing separately to all three sides of the stage.
Carrington’s Dr Faustus should be applauded for the sheer quantity of imaginative ideas that have gone into it. But at the same time, conceptual consistency is a stumbling block for this production. Ideas are great, but theatre is about communication, and an audience is one giant receptor. You can’t just throw ideas at them and assume those ideas will (a) be understandable, and (b) somehow congeal into great theatre. Individually, each idea is a genuine pleasure. But in the words of Mephistopheles, ‘He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.’