Hell is Pants

DOCTOR FAUSTUS

Duke of York’s Theatre, London, Thursday 26^th May, 2016

 

While Robb Stark appears as Romeo in Kenneth Branagh’s production just around the corner, here we get Jon Snow in a play by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe.

I’m referring of course to Kit Harington in the title role, a big name draw to Jamie Lloyd’s reimagining of the tale of the dissatisfied scholar who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of fame and glory.  Harington (as a Game of Thrones fan boy, I am genuinely thrilled to see him!) begins in grey hoodie and spectacles – his Faustus is more of a mature student at the Open University, than a cap-and-gowned Don.   In his grotty flat – think retro motel room – he summons demons.  They don’t have far to come: they watch from all corners of the set, attracted by Faustus’s blasphemous utterances.  The mighty Forbes Masson comes forth as Lucifer, a bald man in grubby vest and pants.  Hell, it emerges, is where you spend eternity in the same underwear.  Menacing and darkly amusing, Masson is as scary as he can be for someone who has forgotten his PE kit.  Compellingly charismatic is Jenna Russell (she who can do no wrong) as Mephistopheles – her karaoke opening to the second act is wickedly funny. She has a deadpan unpredictability that is this production’s real treat.

You’ve gleaned by now Lloyd does not take a traditional approach.  The adaptation by Colin Teevan interpolates new scenes that serve to make Faustus’s glory years more accessible to today’s audience: he becomes a celebrity magician, a kind of Derren Copperfield, of rock-star proportions, entertaining world leaders and getting his face on T-shirts.  Harington is certainly charismatic in this context – his Bill & Ted air guitar riffs only become a little annoying, and the way he declaims his lines suits Faustus’s personality from the off: Faustus is a pompous man whose arrogance brings about his downfall.  The set (by Soutra Gilmour) comes apart, and is revealed to be part of his show.  Canned laughter underscores the dialogue – reminding us that everything is illusion, especially what is promised by the devil…

Off come the hoodie, jeans and singlet.  On go the blood, sweat and tears.  Harington flails around, almost Christ-like, as his time runs out.  His relationship with Wagner (Jade Anouka) makes you hope he can be saved, even though you know he can’t, and makes you hope we can find our own salvation in the love of someone else.

It’s an extremely busy show, teeming with ideas that collide and rebound.  Most of them hit their mark.  There is sheer brilliance when Tom Edden’s Good Angel embodies all seven of the deadly sins in turn.  Evil Angel Craig Stein, in lingerie, struts and pouts in a provocative manner.

The ensemble of demons in their pants create nightmarish tableaux, like Bosch in a bedsit.  There are visual gags, even an actual ball gag, and aural gags, and scenes to make you gag.  But while we wish no harm would come to Harington and his marvellous physique, what is the show getting at?

The set closes in, returning to its original configuration and we are back where we started, except a girl lies raped and murdered, and Faustus revolves on the spot, as though dancing with an invisible demon, forever in a K-hole.  Perhaps the whole thing, the whole 24 years of fame and glory have been nothing but an illusion, and Faustus in a drug-fuelled session has let his rock-star excesses get out of control, bringing about his own damnation.  His longing to feel something, to experience rather than study something, is what leads him astray… That Faustus is inspired to conjure demons by something he reads on the internet may be significant…

There’s never a dull moment.  Lloyd pricks and titillates our imagination.  Shocks are quick and fleeting – there’s always another one along in a minute.  This Doctor Faustus is an enjoyable if at times baffling experience, intense and also frivolous, with plenty of dark and nasty fun, played out by an excellent ensemble. Ultimately, though, it’s like listening to someone tell you about their dreams: you wonder what it’s got to do with you.

Faustus in Kit form (Photo: Marc Brenner)

Going Ape

KAFKA’S MONKEY
Warwick Arts Centre, Thursday 31st May, 2012

Ah, Kafka! That cheerful blighter who requested that all his unpublished works should be burned after his death. Usually, I agree with this assessment, because I find his stuff a bit grim, to say the least.

This performance – Colin Teevan’s adaptation of the short story,A Report To An Academy – went some way towards making me warm to the cheerless old Czech.

This one-act, one-hander begins with the entrance of “Red Peter”, a “former ape”. In bowler hat and dinner jacket, he looks more like a beetle, bringing to mind perhaps Kafka’s most famous work, Metamorphosis. But unlike Gregor Samsa’s tale of dehumanisation, Red Peter’s story brings us the opposite. Through his lecture, which is interspersed with flashback scenes, he tells a tale of humanisation, how changing his behaviour to fit in with the society that traps him, has led only to alienation from his species and from his true self.

We hear how he was captured on the Gold Coast and transported in chains and close confinement below decks, suffering abuse and deprivation along the way to his new home. This sequence brought to mind the horrors of the slave trade. Red Peter, now ‘civilised’, is neither fish nor fowl. He is not human like the rest of society and neither is he the creature he once was. His assimilation has come at a terrible cost, and he, like Kafka’s other protagonists, is ultimately, totally alone, scarred by experience and mistreatment. There is also the idea that our evolution into an industrialised society goes against what is natural.

So far, so grim.

But the telling of this tale lifts the material into something joyous. Kathryn Hunter astounds as the civilised ape. Impossibly flexible – perhaps she has had her skeleton replaced by rubber bands – extremely expressive, articulate and very funny, she impresses at every moment. For all Red Peter’s eloquence, the beast is never far away. The trappings of civilisation are only a mask for our own animalistic impulses, after all. At under an hour in length, Colin Teevan’s script gets the most out of the source material, but I found myself marvelling at the brilliance of the performance rather than feeling any attachment to the character or being implicated in his plight. Rather, the piece is an intellectual exercise – like any lecture to an academy – that has given rise to the considerations I’ve mentioned here.

The best moments are when Hunter (her name is ironic given the context) goes off script and improvises with victims from the audience, making monkeys of them, so to speak. It is a bravura performance from a unique and brilliant artist.

I only hope for her sake that the I Was A Teenage Werewolf hairdo is a wig.