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Doctor Faustus

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

3 out of 5 stars

The story of Faustus, a man who sells his soul for power and pleasure, has crossed centuries and continents, from cautionary medieval legend to Wall Street and beyond. But Christopher Marlowe’s play looks more medieval than modern in Matthew Dunster’s spectacular, overly literal production. It revels in the devils, sins and bawdy superstitious comedy but verges on the ridiculous.

Devils are hard to do in an era where evil no longer wears horns. Dunster, assisted by puppet-maker Stephen Tiplady and costume facilitators too numerous to mention, goes hell for leather on the red and black fetish gear – to grotesquely brilliant effect in a vision of the seven deadly sins, who seem to have erupted from damnation via Ann Summers.

Michael Camp deserves special mention for a slinky turn as Covetousness – not often a scene-stealing role. And Tiplady supplies skeletal bat-winged dragons for Faust and Mephistopheles to ride on.

But the spectacle fails to penetrate or awe in the Globe’s topless space. Hell’s crew are as scary as a stag do, and it’s hard to see what hold Arthur Darvill’s anguished Mephistopheles has over Paul Hilton’s intelligent Faust, more a decent man in a pinch than a soul in self-made agony.

A literal staging like this one comes up against the timebound limits of the Doctor’s imagination: he uses 24 years with Lucifer’s minion at his disposal to get a baroque lapdance, tweak the Pope’s nose and perform conjuring tricks for Felix Scott’s camp German Emperor.

As so often at the Globe, the comedy carries better than the tragedy. Pearce Quigley’s excellent Robin leads a ticklish gaggle of tapstresses and gullible chancers. But the puppets and the music, the sword-fighting angels and the strangely dancing black-lensed German scholars, are too sporadic and effortful to recreate Marlowe’s world in spectacle. Here be dragons – just not quite enough of them.

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