Christopher Marlowe’s most famous play is always at risk of seeming oddly undramatic. Shakespeare’s contemporary, dead at 29, could write hauntingly, but it’s hard to make this unbalanced tragedy feel coherent.
Paulette Randall’s production isn’t chilling and the attempts to engage the audience directly don’t prove richly involving. Yet it does bring a certain zip to an episodic story that, though interesting on the page, can appear crushingly ponderous on stage.
Randall’s biggest decision is casting female performers in the leads. This draws attention to the ferocity with which intellectually curious women have often been put down.
As the bookish Faustus, Jocelyn Jee Esien misses some of the rhythmic regularity of Marlowe’s language, but she grasps that the character is simultaneously charismatic and trapped — a scapegoat in a world where experience is demonised. Having sold her soul to the devil in return for 24 years of power and voluptuousness, her Faustus turns out to be a bit of a joker. Esien has a keen sense of mischief, and opposite her Pauline McLynn, once of Father Ted, is a witty and observant Mephistopheles, while there’s sharply defined support from Sarah Amankwah, Lucie Sword and Louis Maskell.
In this intimate, candlelit venue, the action can feel too hemmed in. But Randall succeeds in heightening the play’s broader comic elements. The most memorable feature of her interpretation is the ceremonial parade of the Seven Deadly Sins, influenced by witnessing a Candomblé ceremony in Brazil, a religious ritual that intriguingly blurs conventional ideas of good and evil.
Until February 2
