Goethe meets George Lucas: an unfulfilling affair
Faust x2
It might sound like quite a leap to go from embodying the most malignant being in a galaxy far, far away to playing a world-weary septuagenarian scholar with a dicky heart. But the undeniable thrill for fans of Star Wars in seeing Ian McDiarmid on stage at the Watermill this month lies not only in the proximity this intimate venue affords spectators to a well-known face but also the points of connection between the power-mad Emperor and the very archetype of a man who, frustrated by the limits of science, turns to the dark side: Faust.
Indeed, it’s hard not to think that McDiarmid, who has distilled Goethe’s blockbuster of a poem (using a hoary Penguin translation), and director Lisa Blair, who boldly pushes the technological envelope, are playing on our prior knowledge about Darth Vader’s boss.
After a mood-setting salvo of flickering lights and ominous sounds, our initial sight of Faust suggests civilised respectability – the Scottish actor, 72, is suited, waistcoated, bespectacled, professorial. Yet once he has made his pact with Mephisto, here a cocksure, hoodie-wearing youth, his Faust becomes creepiness incarnate, skulking in the shadows, his face obscured by the hood he, too, has adopted; Goethe meets George Lucas, if you will.
In contrast to the globe-trotting escapades of Christopher Marlowe’s more familiar tragedy, this version strips things to their essentials: a quest to obtain carnal delight with the virtuous Gretchen.
If the script had a comparable simplicity, this might hit home more powerfully. Yet the ear is soon glutted by the feast of couplets, and some of the phrasing is so over-ripe, it’s hard work harvesting coherent sense, especially when combined with McDiarmid’s attacking way with words, snapping slack jaws tight in icy petulance.
Despite the impressive projected visuals, suggesting a world of gizmoassisted gratifications, it feels as though the creative team have missed a trick too in not making Faust more explicitly a figure for our times in his anguished obsession with youth.
A simple, effective theatrical device has Faust wooing Daisy Fairclough’s bright-eyed Gretchen through the proxy of Jacques Miche’s Mephisto – the latter eerily lip-synching the older man’s words. Yet the dubious rapture of possessing the body of a young man or, for that matter, “enjoying” a girl young enough to be his granddaughter isn’t sufficiently explored.
Just as Faust is left finally unsated, I wound up craving more thought-provoking matter with less logorrheic art.