Symphony for the Devil  

The text of The Tragicall Hiftory of the Life and Death of Doctor Fauftus survives, as literary scholars remind us, in a mangled and encrusted form. Christopher Marlowe was born in that same vintage year as Shakespeare and Galileo, into a world torn asunder by Reformation theology and then enlightened and inspired by Renaissance astronomy and philosophy. Marlowe was the first to conceive of the stage potential of one of the greatest legends ever told – a tale of a man who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for a few years of temporal pleasure.

John Gast, a Protestant pastor from Basle, credited Faust with supernatural powers. Melanchthon went further by expressing the belief he was killed by the Devil and that his black dog was a demon. And Luther declared that, with God’s help, Faust was able to overcome evil and reach salvation. With so many variations and dramatic elaborations, it is unsurprising that more than one version of Marlowe’s play has been handed down to us.

This Globe production – the first in Shakespeare’s reconstructed ‘wooden O’ – has admirably contended with the play’s structural flaws, plot inconsistencies, stylistic incongruities and theological contradictions. And the result is a triumph of spine-tingling spectacle. Director Matthew Dunster conjures in a way that would delight the Prince of Darkness himself. The spooky music of the spheres (by Jules Maxwell) anticipates the dark necromancy and cosmic battle between good and evil. From the first appearance of the angels of darkness and light (Charlotte Broom and Beatriz Romilly), Dunster gives us a pageant of pride, ambition and lust against a backdrop of the eternal quest for salvation over damnation.   

And with the promise of omniscience, lusts quenched and the ability to turn invisible, Paul Hilton’s dreamy Faustus just can’t resist damnation. ‘Veni, veni, Mephistopheles,’ he eagerly intones, and then casually barters away his soul for four-and-twenty years of whatever his heart (or other organ) desires. That’s the problem with sin: it’s fun and infectious, and to hell (literally) with the consequences.

Hilton’s Faustus isn’t very conflicted: he fills the stage with lecherous passion for earthly pleasure, and the hereafter isn’t given a second thought. Need cash? No problem – have a whole bank. Doubt religion? Meet Pope Adrian – shame and humiliate him at his gluttonous banquet. Fancy sex? It’s available on tap – with Helen of Troy, if required. And so, intoxicated by a moment of madness, Doctor John Faustus bequeaths his body and soul to the Hellish Prince of the Orient and his messenger Mephistopheles, just so he can be – for a moment – Emperor of the World.

And the great Globe gives us a world that is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious. The Seven Deadly Sins are the macabre highlight, especially Michael Camp’s Covetousness, who flits around the stage like Gollum on acid. Gluttony and Sloth are also excellent, though the entire ensemble is an entrancing orgy of delight. The puppetry is quite breathtaking: we have winged dragons, demons on stilts and a mesmeric, Luciferic goat-head. The dance of the heavenly spheres – the orbs of Galileo’s heaven – is a sublime moment. Indeed, Paul Wills’ whole design is a feast of divine creation.
    
Arthur Darvill creates a Mephistopheles as dark, enigmatic and smooth as a coffee liqueur. There are no clichés in his performance, no pointy tails or pitchforks: just a subtle sense of one who has long communed with darkness and contemplated intensely the face of evil. When he speaks, it is like a needle dipped in lemon juice pricking the tongue. Every sinew is extended and every breath expended to ensnare the soul of Faustus.

Amid all the incantations of evil, the comic interludes are fiendishly difficult to get right in a morality play that is primarily concerned with the serious business of salvation. But in this more secular-humanist age of anarchic hedonism, Pearce Quigley’s clown, Robin, is better received than all the fairytale theology and obscure, puritanical discussions about the wages of sin and the unquenchable fire. He provides as much light relief as one could hope for, and more. The groundlings are squirted with water and splattered with spits of masticated banana; there is urination and drunkenness; lechery and bawdiness. Much of Marlowe’s Latin is excised to give space to this ‘more accessible’ comedy, and Quigley exploits all the farcical possibilities as the groundlings clap and cheer him along.     

But when the time of reckoning comes, a deathbed repentance doesn’t quite wash with Marlowe’s doctrine of God. The heart of the ‘unsatiable speculator’ is hardened: his body and soul, flesh and blood fly to Lucifer and the abode of hell, there to remain and be tortured forever: consummatum est. If ‘all places shall be hell that is not heaven’, the Globe has produced the distilled concentrate.

Whether you’re into contrition, prayer and repentance, or happen to believe that heaven is just an illusion, you’ll find this production of Doctor Faustus a symphony to the Devil and a masque to Hades. Its shadows will long captivate the mind, and you’ll leave the theatre with more than whiff of sulphur in your nostrils.
   
Photo credits: Arthur Darvill as Mephistopheles and Paul Hilton as Doctor Faustus. Photo by Keith Pattison.
 

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