The darker offering from the RSC’s two-play stint at the Barbican, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, also treated to a haircut, runs with no interval, creating a taut, hectic race through the life of the amoral philosopher. Faustus (Sandy Grierson), a worshipper of the occult, is here a shaven-headed contemporary intellectual so bored with the slog of understanding life that he resorts to nihilism, looking and sounding like the kind of bored contemporary artist out to shock the critics. Maria Aberg’s sparse production gives us a harsh stage of cardboard boxes and discarded books, Stanley-knife fights and a soundscape of mounting dread. Faust’s seductions evoke the predatory exploitation of a paedophile, which is a stretch, since Helen of Troy (Jade Croot) was wordly enough to look after herself.
The perennial problem of Faustus for modern audiences can be that devils are hard to make scary for a modern audience. This production tries to solve that by allowing us to be entertained and chilled at the same time, with a host of burlesque minor devils and hideous popes and princes. The eagle-eyed will note that this owes a lot more to Complicite’s production of The Master and Margarita than to Marlowe. This interpretation sees Faustus and Mephistophilis (Oliver Ryan) as two sides of the same character — so much so that who plays each role is decided by chance on stage, via a contest to see whose lit match is extinguished first, so you might well end up seeing them the other way round. Aberg’s vision has few moments of redemption in sight. The grand metaphysical sweep suffers a bit in the reshaping, but the dull ache of ambition turned to despair and violence resonates around the howling empty stage of the final scenes.
The polite version of a Faustian bargain is the one between the young and the old. So raise your hipster pork pie hat, please, to the Lyric Hammersmith. It has succeeded where many off-West End theatres try and fail to lure a younger audience and stage work targeted on the next generation of theatregoers, with carefully selected works. True, the scrawled pseudo-graffiti on the walls looks a bit like a Grange Hill set — an idea of what tolerant adults in the arts thing the kids like. But I watched Andrew Bovell’s Things I Know to Be True among an audience of twenty-somethings torn between reliance on parents and a desire to be free.
Set over a year in the home of the Price family in Australia (this is a co-production between a young British theatre company, Frantic Assembly, and the State Theatre Company of South Australia), we meet Rosie (Kirsty Oswald) nursing a broken heart and empty bank account after her gap year. The warmth of kitchen table chatter gives way to outbreaks of jealousy and spite, followed by the restitching of relationships which allows family life to roll on, warts and all. Imogen Stubbs is domineering mum Fran who favours her sons while Bob (a careworn Ewan Stewart) faces redundancy and a crumbling marriage in the perfect Dad-on-the-rocks storm.
This warm-hearted and clear-eyed saga of modern families goes on to tour shortly to lots of places with student audiences, ending up at Chichester, spiritual home of mum and dads, in November. Take your stroppy offspring and you’ll both recognise the shifting alchemy of the domestic sphere, in all its squabbling glory, regrets and resilience.
The perennial problem of Faustus for modern audiences can be that devils are hard to make scary for a modern audience. This production tries to solve that by allowing us to be entertained and chilled at the same time, with a host of burlesque minor devils and hideous popes and princes. The eagle-eyed will note that this owes a lot more to Complicite’s production of The Master and Margarita than to Marlowe. This interpretation sees Faustus and Mephistophilis (Oliver Ryan) as two sides of the same character — so much so that who plays each role is decided by chance on stage, via a contest to see whose lit match is extinguished first, so you might well end up seeing them the other way round. Aberg’s vision has few moments of redemption in sight. The grand metaphysical sweep suffers a bit in the reshaping, but the dull ache of ambition turned to despair and violence resonates around the howling empty stage of the final scenes.
The polite version of a Faustian bargain is the one between the young and the old. So raise your hipster pork pie hat, please, to the Lyric Hammersmith. It has succeeded where many off-West End theatres try and fail to lure a younger audience and stage work targeted on the next generation of theatregoers, with carefully selected works. True, the scrawled pseudo-graffiti on the walls looks a bit like a Grange Hill set — an idea of what tolerant adults in the arts thing the kids like. But I watched Andrew Bovell’s Things I Know to Be True among an audience of twenty-somethings torn between reliance on parents and a desire to be free.
Set over a year in the home of the Price family in Australia (this is a co-production between a young British theatre company, Frantic Assembly, and the State Theatre Company of South Australia), we meet Rosie (Kirsty Oswald) nursing a broken heart and empty bank account after her gap year. The warmth of kitchen table chatter gives way to outbreaks of jealousy and spite, followed by the restitching of relationships which allows family life to roll on, warts and all. Imogen Stubbs is domineering mum Fran who favours her sons while Bob (a careworn Ewan Stewart) faces redundancy and a crumbling marriage in the perfect Dad-on-the-rocks storm.
This warm-hearted and clear-eyed saga of modern families goes on to tour shortly to lots of places with student audiences, ending up at Chichester, spiritual home of mum and dads, in November. Take your stroppy offspring and you’ll both recognise the shifting alchemy of the domestic sphere, in all its squabbling glory, regrets and resilience.
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