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by Christopher Marlowe, directed by Maria Aberg

Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, GBR

February 11-August 4, 2016;

Barbican Theatre, London

September 7-October 1, 2016

Mephistophilis: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it”

After years of despairing that I would ever see a professional production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in Canada, it came time to look elsewhere.  The Stratford Festival has never staged it and waited until 2005 to produce Marlowe’s Edward II.  Therefore, when the Royal Shakespeare Company announced a production for 2016, I had to see it.    

The RSC production directed by Maria Aberg is extraordinarily inventive and full of insights based on a close reading of the text.  One might well say “texts” because for such a famous work it happens that there is no definitive version.  There are the texts published in 1604 and 1616, both long after Marlowe’s death in 1593 and both quite different from each other.  A director basically has to create the version of the text to be used by combining elements of both versions.  Aberg has created a particularly satisfying version and has fleshed out elements of the action that appear minor in the text in order to give them the dramatic weight they need to carry. 

The first of Aberg’s insights is to make Doctor Faustus and Mephistophilis mirror images of each other.  Onto Naomi Dawson’s set strewn with paperback textbooks and cardboard boxes of papers, enter actors Sandy Grierson and Ryan Oliver, both with shaved heads and wearing identical 1950s-style suits with skinny ties.  Simultaneously, each lights a match.  The rule is that whoever’s match burns out first plays Faustus, the other Mephistophilis.  The night I attended, Oliver was Faustus and Grierson the lower devil. 

This is not the first time a director has seen the two as parallel characters.  In one of the most revolutionary productions of Gounod’s Faust for the Paris Opera, Jorge Lavelli clad both Faust and Méphistophélès in identical 19th-century garb.  The effect this had in Libelli’s production and that it has in Aberg’s is to change a tale of outward temptation into a psychomachia about internal temptation.  Aberg’s dreamlike staging in particular suggests that we are seeing the outward manifestations of the struggles occurring in Faustus’s mind.

Aberg has set all the action in Faustus’s study which comprises the thrust of the Swan Theatre stage cut off from the the larger upstage area by a wall of paper.  Before Faustus begins conjuring up Mephistophilis, he throws all the books on philosophy and theology that he has found so useless along with boxes of papers through the paper wall creating a rift between the outside world and his study.  One could see this as a rift between the strictures of his academic mind and the realities outside it.  Aberg has Faustus paint a circle with a pentagram inside it on the black stage using his own shirt as the brush.  To the genuinely eerie music of Orlando Gough played live from the balcony high above the upstage area, Faustus invokes the devil using words Gough has chosen from the Kaballah.  Eventually, we hear a voice joining Faustus in his chant and it is Mephistophilis, shirtless and barefoot in a white suit who enters through the tear in the wall.  Suddenly a hoard of devils dressed as “Scholars” tear down the remains of the wall and Faustus’s study is no longer a protected retreat. 

Significantly, all of Faustus’s main encounters take place within the area that was his study, suggesting that even though it is now open, he never, mentally, really leaves it.  The most obvious example of this is the tour of the world that Mephistophilis takes Faustus on which he does simply by writing in chalk the names of the various places visited on the black study floor.  

One of the greatest aspects of of Aberg’s production is how she emphasizes the folly of Faustus’s entire undertaking.  Faustus sees necromancy as a means to regain the supreme power over the world that God has withheld from man.  Yet, constantly every time Mephistophilis points out a fact that contradicts Faustus’s notion of power and grandeur, Faustus refuses to listen.  Faustus exclaims, “Did not my conjuring speeches raise thee? speak!” which Mephistophilis contradicts by saying, “That was the cause, but yet per accidens; For, when we hear one rack the name of God, ... We fly, in hope to get his glorious soul”.  When Faustus asks, “How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?”, Mephistophilis makes the key reply, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it: Think’st thou that I, that saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?”

What Aberg shows so well, primarily through sometimes wry, sometimes pitying looks of Mephistophilis is how Faustus may have signed away his soul for immeasurable power but how that power is used is confined by the limits of the imagination of the person who would use it.  What the entire sequence of episodes that follows Faustus’s signing of the pact demonstrated with such terrible force is how limited Faustus’s imagination is and thus how paltry is his use of his magical power.  When he could ask Mephistophilis to answer any question, all Faustus asks are questions whose answers he already knows.  When he asks to be made invisible, all he does with the power is to play practical jokes on the Pope by overturning his dinner. 

When Faustus grows tired of his power and begins to reflect on what he has done, his Good and Evil Angels, a heritage of medieval drama, appear.  Aberg emphasizes the play as psychodrama by having the actors who played Faustus’s students, Valdes and Cornelius, Will Bliss and John Cummins, also play these angels, both however, dressed identically and both wearing black wings.  Thus, Aberg shows it is not heaven- or hell-sent thoughts that Faustus chooses from but thoughts generated within his own mind. 

Mephistophilis and Lucifer, here played as a disdainful woman by Eleanor Wyld, create entertainments for him, the most famous of which is the masque-like parade of the Seven Deadly Sins.  As with all the various beings in the play, except for Faustus’s faithful servant Wagner (Nicholas Lumley) who is clad in earthen colours, the Sins are dressed in combinations of black and white.  Designer Naomi Dawson has ensured that the Sins are horribly grotesque and in no way attractive to leave no doubt that the life beyond the bounds of conventional morality that Faustus has chosen is visibly repellent.

Thus like Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s two-part play about him or Edward II, Gaveston or Mortimer Junior in Edward II, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is a study in the folly humans entertain in trying to obtain power.  Faustus is simply the most obvious example of someone who believes that a limited human being can do anything more with power except destroy himself.    

The main advantage of having either Sandy Grierson or Ryan Oliver play Faustus is that both look so ordinary, ineffectual even.  This makes eminent sense if Faustus is regarded as a type of Everyman and makes sense of what the soldier Benvolio (Tom McCall) says when he sees him in the court of the Emperor of Germany (Gabriel Fleary), “Blood, he speaks terribly! but, for all that, I do not greatly believe him:  he looks as like a conjurer as the Pope to a costermonger”.  Oliver seems like a petty academic who has gone mad with ambition.  His greatest flaw in showing how worked up Faustus gets himself is in speaking his lines too quickly and thus missing out on nuance.  He is excellent in Faustus’s final moments seeming less like a hero struck down than a rat trapped in a cage of his own making.

Sandy Grierson is sly, cool, almost bored Mephistophilis, a demon who has seen human beings make the same mistake innumerable times.  He tells Faustus from the start, “O, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands, Which strike a terror to my fainting soul!” with no suggestion that he is frightened and with no suggestion that Faustus will listen to him.

The same coolness is evident in Eleanor Wyld’s Lucifer, who, like Mephistophilis, seems merely to be playing a game and biding her time until the arrival of the known outcome.  Will Bliss and John Cummins play the Good and Evil Angel’s as equally overwrought, in great contrast to Nicholas Lumley’s Wagner, who is really the only sensible, down-to-earth being, mortal or immortal, in the play and thus a touchstone for the qualities Faustus is lacking.  Aberg’s greatest casting innovation is to have the young Jade Croot play a a childlike Helen of Troy.  Faustus has said he wants her for his paramour, but when we see her we realize how different she is from Faustus’s view of her.  In her completely silent interaction with him, Croot repeatedly pushes him away (since he is no handsome Paris) or suddenly embraces him as if to mock him.

For this passage Aberg has Mephistophilis speak the lines Marlowe assigns to Faustus as if Mephistophilis were speaking aloud the thoughts of the other.  Aberg has amended the text in other ways.  She omits the moralizing Chorus that opens and closes the play and she omits the Clown, the only truly comic figure, who accompanies Wagner, which omission only makes Wagner’s few lines of sorrow and disbelief have greater impact.   

Orlando Gough’s sometimes harsh music plays an integral role in elevating the scenes of spectacle that Aberg creates.  So do Naomi Dawson’s costumes that seem inspired by silent films from Metropolis to Charlie Chaplin.  Her one great failure, strangely enough, is in depicting the Seven Deadly Sins, only one of which can be guessed at by his appearance.  We understand their costumes after they identify themselves but the effect should work the other way around.

All in all, having waited so long to see such an important play, I now feel that I will likely never see a production again that presents the central irony of the play so clearly.  The devil is not man’s enemy.  Man’s worst enemy is himself.  If you are anywhere near Stratford-upon-Avon, be sure to see the exciting, thought-provoking production while you can.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Ryan Oliver and Sandy Grierson;  Sandy Grierson as Mephistophilis; Ryan Oliver as Faustus. ©2016 Helen Maybanks.  

For tickets, visit www.rsc.org.uk.