It starts quite well. You take your seat in the auditorium of the Duke of York’s to the strains of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell and The Devil Went Down to Georgia, by the Charlie Daniels Band. Maybe the director Jamie Lloyd and the rewriter Colin Teevan have really managed it here, you think. Maybe Christopher Marlowe’s dark fable of the brilliant scholar of Wittenberg, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for limitless worldly power, has been remade bang up to date and thrilling.
The set is pretty dingy, though: a kind of grubby student bedsit that you expect to give way to something far grander, but never does. And things aren’t helped when Lucifer (Forbes Masson) appears as the Chorus to deliver the first line, which isn’t Marlowe’s first line: “Only this, gentlemen — we must perform , the form of Faustus’s fortunes, good or bad.” Except he is in a grubby-looking vest and underpants. Maybe this is supposed to echo the look of some of the loinclothed unfortunates in Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of hell. It seems more like the costume department ran out of money.
Kit Harington is Faustus, in a grey hoodie and nasty tracksuit bottoms, staring vacantly at the telly. He certainly looks like a student, but not a very brilliant one. Later on, he strips down to his underwear as well, exhibiting a pert torso. He remains this way for the rest of the show, but for a scene where he takes off his underpants to rape a woman he has just stabbed. A year ago, Harington said that he found being labelled a “hunk” both “demeaning” and “offensive”. “It can sometimes feel like your art is being put to one side for your sex appeal. And I don’t like that.”
We know Harington can act well enough from that TV series he’s in — though he was also in Pompeii, one of the worst films ever made. He suggests real torment at times, but at others he appears more like a tearful drunk. With laryngitis. And he can’t pronounce “aphorism”.
It gets worse. He is soon joined on stage by a naked Morticia Addams type, another naked chap in specs, who looks like a middle-aged Harry Potter gone to seed, and various other figures wandering around in his kitchen. There’s a chap who leans out of the loo over on the right and vomits a lot of toothpaste foam down his front. Possibly this is supposed to be infernal ectoplasm, I don’t know, but it looked to me as if he’d just put too much Colgate on his toothbrush. Another chap urges Faustus to “think of honour... think of wealth”, while squeezing tomato ketchup down his front. Yet another chap throws up some darker matter, possibly last night’s vindaloo, over on the sofa, and nobody clears it up. Typical students. Later on, Lucifer takes a dump.
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Amid all these unpleasant evacuations, the majesty and beauty of Marlowe’s mighty lines get rather lost. A female Mephistopheles (Jenna Russell) appears, in obligatory nightie, and tells Faustus: “I’ll cull thee out the fairest courtesans, and bring them every morning to thy bed. She whom thine eye shall like, thy heart shall have, be she as chaste as was Penelope, as wise as Saba, or as beautiful as was bright Lucifer before his fall.” While saying this, her hand is jiggling away down inside his trackie bottoms. And that really is what the stately beauty and freakish satire of Marlowe’s play are reduced to by this dreadful version: a load of old toss.
Gone is the sense of cosmic grandeur, gone is the sombre, haunted Christian landscape, in which every act, word and even thought of man or woman, high-born or low, is weighed and counted towards their eternal destiny. Instead, despite sly touches like the plastic Jesus or the appearance of the Pope, what you are left with is a shallow secular drama about celebrity and its pitfalls, which are two-a-penny nowadays. All the profundity and nobility of the original, and the horror of Faustus’s tragic fall, are drowned out by crass gimmicks, puerile shocks, buckets of blood and loud music. In an opera house, this kind of butchery of a great work would be openly booed, as Katie Mitchell’s Lucia di Lammermoor has been recently at Covent Garden. Theatre audiences are far too polite.
“Harington certainly looks like a student, but not a very brilliant one
The middle of the play, with its fast-moving and bewildering scenes of farce, have always been difficult. Teevan has rewritten them in modern idiom, so that instead of Faustus’s soaring, world-conquering, quintessentially Renaissance ambition — “I’ll have them fly to India for gold, ransack the ocean for orient pearl, and search all corners of the new-found world for pleasant fruits and princely delicates” — all you’re left with is the sense of a desperate wannabe who becomes a famous stage magician, plays air guitar in an amusing way and gets to perform for Barack Obama.
It’s an unutterable mess. The low point is surely the rape of his female servant, Wagner, after he has just stabbed her bloodily, while delivering: “O, thou art fairer than the evening air [grunt], clad in the beauty of a thousand stars [hump]; brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter [thrust, etc].” And what of his final damnation? Who cares?
In the interval, Mephistopheles sat on the edge of the stage and sang Bat Out of Hell, while Lucifer jigged around on the sofa behind her. This was the best thing in the whole night. That’s how bad it was.
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Doctor Faustus
Duke of York’s, London WC2
★
