There’s an intriguing concept behind Joss Bennathan’s urban reconfiguration of Christopher Marlowe’s drama of hubris and damnation but, flashy visuals aside, the play’s soul is sucked out by a distinctly lifeless rendering of the text. The theatre company Present Moment emphasises the importance of inclusivity and this production features students alongside professional actors; there is, though, a lack of conviction to the performances that no amount of window-dressing can disguise.
Even as Faustus begins his dangerous dabblings in necromancy the setting is an infernal metropolis. Fine beams of light, suggesting marionette strings manipulated by an unseen hand, criss-cross the gloom and besuited bodies writhe and twitch, puppet-like. Drunken City boys brawl; sinister commuters whisper devilish imprecations from behind newspapers, and le Carr?-esque figures in raincoats and trilbies lurk in the shadows. A cuckold’s horns are evoked by a performer, crouched above another’s head like an incubus, contorting his arms.
Babou Ceesay’s Faustus is a fusty, academic figure in his Fair Isle cardigan and too-short tweedy trousers, while Simon Rivers as Mephistopheles makes his first appearance totally nude in a puff of green smoke before returning, first as a whey-faced vicar and then as an oily banker. Their exchanges, though, lack dynamism, and it’s difficult to believe that the measured Ceesay feels either vaulting ambition as he signs his impious pact or naked terror as he is dragged down to Hell.
Kieron Singh, weaselly as Faustus’s servant Wagner, and Jack Donnelly’s spivish clown Robin add some welcome texture; but despite the physicality and frequent scene-shifting — rather too much clattery rearranging of furniture — the production is frustratingly flat. Bennathan’s point seems to be that, in our materialistic modern world, we are in danger of selling our souls for temporary, trivial pleasure; but the message loses its sting in a staging where a lack of intensity means we never feel very much is at stake.
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Box office: 0844 3572625, to Feb 6