Gimmicks galore, this Dr Faustus was real hell

DIRECTORIAL touches dominate the Royal shakespeare Company’s new production of ‘Dr Faustus’. It has Brechtian singing, a punk-rockish array of Deadly sins, a filthy stage (splashed with a whitewash pentagram which few in the stalls will be able to see) and a chorus of students dressed in black hats.

some of this chorus are women wearing moustaches and Groucho Marxish glasses. A joke spectacle, indeed. Their acting is more what you would expect from a student show than from the august RsC. Actors sandy Grierson and Oliver Ryan decide only at the start of each night’s performance which of them will play Faustus and which will play satan’s sidekick Mephistophilis. Please don’t call it a silly stunt. My dears, this is a psychological interpretation, showing us that Faustus and his tempter are but two sides of the same person.

Mephistophilis utters the play’s best- known speech, the hymn to Helen of Troy starting ‘is this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ In the text this speech belongs to Faustus. Director Maria Aberg may want us to accept that greedy Faustus and his devilish companion are one and the same but it would have helped if we could actually hear the lines. Instead they are rendered inaudible by some music.

Chinstrokers will be in their element. Others may feel that the surfeit of gimmicks by Miss Aberg subjugate the humanity of the tale.

sandy Grierson (pictured – who played Faustus on Monday night) is Mr Intense from the start. Where is Faustus the college don in his pomp, Faustus the plausible charmer, the Faustus we might almost ourselves envy as he dives into 24 years of hedonism. The aesthetic here is so jagged, so overdesigned. It becomes baffling that any man would surrender his soul for such ugly deadly sins.

Oliver Ryan makes a whispery, passive Mephistophilis. Mr Grierson’s skinny Faustus, whose scots accent takes some getting used to, looks more like a bloke who would frequent a gym than a five-star brothel. His balletic courtship of Helen suggests that Faustus is a pederast. Not easy to watch.