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★★☆☆☆
When I booked my ticket to see Doctor Faustus at The Duke of York's Theatre I was very aware that it would be my first review on this blog. I was really hoping to see something that would blow me away, I wanted to be able to sing its praises and make this first post a really positive one. I have never wanted to be a mean critic, it would be much too easy to sit back and nit pick every little perceived fault in a show from the (relative) comfort of a little fold down seat, safely hidden amidst a sea of strangers in the dark. The amount of time and energy that goes into theatre deserves more consideration and respect than that. Unfortunately I also promised myself that, above all, I would be an honest critic, which is why it pains me to say that the review which you are about to read is less glowing praise and applause, and more scowling and muttering under one's breath in a disgruntled manner.
The fact that I arrived five minutes before curtain-up and the theatre was still half empty should have been the first sign that something was amiss. I sat down and was quickly asked to move again by a member of staff who informed me that I was being upgraded. This is how I managed to watch Doctor Faustus at The Duke of York's Theatre from a very good seat in the stalls for a mere £25. Incredible value for money! At least that's what I thought before the lights went down...
Almost from start to finish Doctor Faustus was messy, that's the only way to describe it. There were too many ideas flying about, too many concepts, too many 'clever' plans for it, and not a single one of them was completely followed through on. It started off with a promising opening, with Faustus played by Kit Harington (Game of Thrones) bare foot and bundled up in a grey hoodie and tracksuit bottoms, fixated on a television screen amidst a dingy, council-flat-chic set. As the first lines of dialogue were spoken the play seemed to be going for a 'displaced and disillusioned youth' narrative, Faustus's character bringing to mind a young man in a world with nothing to offer him. He seemed like the sort of youth who's mugshot might be found pictured below a murder headline, the angsty young man who couldn't get a decent job or a girlfriend so wallowed in self-pity, stewing in his own perception of how unfair life is until finally losing it. The sort of kid described by the press as a 'mentally disturbed lone wolf' let down by the system, ultimately going out into a public place with a shotgun to let loose a few rounds into innocent civilians. Faustus came across as a creepy, introverted creature, dwelling in a cave-like bedroom and finding solace in an obsession with demons, magic, and the occult on online forums.
At least for the for the first ten minutes.
If The Jamie Lloyd Company had chosen to stick with this initial concept they could have made a more than decent bit of theatre, but just as it was getting into its stride it seemed to falter and morph into something different. There was suddenly a gratuitous amount of vomit, spit, blood, shit, and sexual attacks happening all over the place, with some full frontal nudity thrown in for good measure. I'm not the sort of audience member who's sensibilities are too delicate for this sort of theatre, but I do take offence when it's done for shock value alone. It all seemed totally unnecessary. I wondered whether the creators thought they were putting on Sarah Kane's 'Cleansed' over at the National and had stumbled, fistfuls of blood capsules in hand, into the wrong theatre.
Knowing that a large part of the play had been re-written by Colin Teevan, I had joked with the friend who was accompanying me that the new bits might be better than the parts with the original Elizabethan script. To my horror this ended up being the case. Many of the cast, Harington not excluded, were guilty of simply orating their lines from Christopher Marlowe's portions of the play, butchering the script until it was void of one ounce of empathy or emotional engagement and losing the meaning completely. It was as if the cast were going through the necessary evils of the Ye Olde Script and just waiting for it to be over so that the modern bit, which started about twenty minutes into the play, could kick in. The Marlovian script being replaced halfway through the first act with a twenty first century script was something else that, sadly, just didn't work at all. On paper it probably sounded great, but the reality of it was puzzling and felt unnecessary. The Elizabethan scenes were without a doubt the weakest and hung off of either end of the new modern script at odd angles as though they'd been badly bolted on with the wrong kinds of fixtures by someone who'd never done DIY before.
Doctor Faustus was trashy and it was tacky, and that was probably its only saving grace. The trashiness and tackiness almost succeeded in enhancing and highlighting some of the attempted themes of capitalism, political corruption, and media saturation. It could have been a great play, or at least a good one, if it had had the courage of its conviction and just followed through on one or two of its themes instead of skirting around the edge of a mess of different things. If it was trying to be controversial it failed. If it was trying to be poignant it failed. If it was trying to tell us something about modern celebrity it sort of missed the mark there too, especially when you consider the irony that its main pull for audiences was TV heartthrob Kit Harington, who spents half the show wearing tiny pants and not much else for some inexplicable reason. The direction was bad. It would be easy to knock Harington as a one trick pony and accuse him of a wooden and perplexingly scattered performance in the title role, but most of Doctor Faustus's main issues stemmed from some really lousy and conflicting direction, which unfortunately resulted in making the final piece feel a bit like an A-Level drama assessment.
Who was this play for? What was it trying to be?
It's a shame, there was a lot of potential here, but needless to say Christopher Marlowe is probably turning in his grave every evening while this abomination is taking place, pausing just long enough to appreciate the scenes of homo-eroticism and Mephistopheles singing 'Bat Out of Hell' on karaoke.
When I booked my ticket to see Doctor Faustus at The Duke of York's Theatre I was very aware that it would be my first review on this blog. I was really hoping to see something that would blow me away, I wanted to be able to sing its praises and make this first post a really positive one. I have never wanted to be a mean critic, it would be much too easy to sit back and nit pick every little perceived fault in a show from the (relative) comfort of a little fold down seat, safely hidden amidst a sea of strangers in the dark. The amount of time and energy that goes into theatre deserves more consideration and respect than that. Unfortunately I also promised myself that, above all, I would be an honest critic, which is why it pains me to say that the review which you are about to read is less glowing praise and applause, and more scowling and muttering under one's breath in a disgruntled manner.
The fact that I arrived five minutes before curtain-up and the theatre was still half empty should have been the first sign that something was amiss. I sat down and was quickly asked to move again by a member of staff who informed me that I was being upgraded. This is how I managed to watch Doctor Faustus at The Duke of York's Theatre from a very good seat in the stalls for a mere £25. Incredible value for money! At least that's what I thought before the lights went down...
Almost from start to finish Doctor Faustus was messy, that's the only way to describe it. There were too many ideas flying about, too many concepts, too many 'clever' plans for it, and not a single one of them was completely followed through on. It started off with a promising opening, with Faustus played by Kit Harington (Game of Thrones) bare foot and bundled up in a grey hoodie and tracksuit bottoms, fixated on a television screen amidst a dingy, council-flat-chic set. As the first lines of dialogue were spoken the play seemed to be going for a 'displaced and disillusioned youth' narrative, Faustus's character bringing to mind a young man in a world with nothing to offer him. He seemed like the sort of youth who's mugshot might be found pictured below a murder headline, the angsty young man who couldn't get a decent job or a girlfriend so wallowed in self-pity, stewing in his own perception of how unfair life is until finally losing it. The sort of kid described by the press as a 'mentally disturbed lone wolf' let down by the system, ultimately going out into a public place with a shotgun to let loose a few rounds into innocent civilians. Faustus came across as a creepy, introverted creature, dwelling in a cave-like bedroom and finding solace in an obsession with demons, magic, and the occult on online forums.
At least for the for the first ten minutes.
If The Jamie Lloyd Company had chosen to stick with this initial concept they could have made a more than decent bit of theatre, but just as it was getting into its stride it seemed to falter and morph into something different. There was suddenly a gratuitous amount of vomit, spit, blood, shit, and sexual attacks happening all over the place, with some full frontal nudity thrown in for good measure. I'm not the sort of audience member who's sensibilities are too delicate for this sort of theatre, but I do take offence when it's done for shock value alone. It all seemed totally unnecessary. I wondered whether the creators thought they were putting on Sarah Kane's 'Cleansed' over at the National and had stumbled, fistfuls of blood capsules in hand, into the wrong theatre.
Knowing that a large part of the play had been re-written by Colin Teevan, I had joked with the friend who was accompanying me that the new bits might be better than the parts with the original Elizabethan script. To my horror this ended up being the case. Many of the cast, Harington not excluded, were guilty of simply orating their lines from Christopher Marlowe's portions of the play, butchering the script until it was void of one ounce of empathy or emotional engagement and losing the meaning completely. It was as if the cast were going through the necessary evils of the Ye Olde Script and just waiting for it to be over so that the modern bit, which started about twenty minutes into the play, could kick in. The Marlovian script being replaced halfway through the first act with a twenty first century script was something else that, sadly, just didn't work at all. On paper it probably sounded great, but the reality of it was puzzling and felt unnecessary. The Elizabethan scenes were without a doubt the weakest and hung off of either end of the new modern script at odd angles as though they'd been badly bolted on with the wrong kinds of fixtures by someone who'd never done DIY before.
Doctor Faustus was trashy and it was tacky, and that was probably its only saving grace. The trashiness and tackiness almost succeeded in enhancing and highlighting some of the attempted themes of capitalism, political corruption, and media saturation. It could have been a great play, or at least a good one, if it had had the courage of its conviction and just followed through on one or two of its themes instead of skirting around the edge of a mess of different things. If it was trying to be controversial it failed. If it was trying to be poignant it failed. If it was trying to tell us something about modern celebrity it sort of missed the mark there too, especially when you consider the irony that its main pull for audiences was TV heartthrob Kit Harington, who spents half the show wearing tiny pants and not much else for some inexplicable reason. The direction was bad. It would be easy to knock Harington as a one trick pony and accuse him of a wooden and perplexingly scattered performance in the title role, but most of Doctor Faustus's main issues stemmed from some really lousy and conflicting direction, which unfortunately resulted in making the final piece feel a bit like an A-Level drama assessment.
Who was this play for? What was it trying to be?
It's a shame, there was a lot of potential here, but needless to say Christopher Marlowe is probably turning in his grave every evening while this abomination is taking place, pausing just long enough to appreciate the scenes of homo-eroticism and Mephistopheles singing 'Bat Out of Hell' on karaoke.
