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The Rose
is one of those spaces you walk into and go 'wow'. The site is halfway
through the exacavation of Philip Henslowe's original Rose built in
1587. The hollowed out, dank and cavernous interior promises the magical
happenings that tearing away (literally) walls of the theatre can allow.
As I took my seat I had in my mind Ian McDiarmid's and Jonathan Kent's
fantastical Tempest in the shell of the old Almeida with Aiden
Gillen spinning out of waterpools as Ariel. Imagine the same sort of
effort with Marlowe in a similar anything-goes shell.
I was
disappointed. It is undoubtedly a neat idea: entangle Marlowe's works
around the story of Faustus, the scholar who sells his soul to the Devil,
suggesting that these works are the fevered imaginings of the possessed
author/scholar Marlowe/Faustus. But you need to be able to live up to
the imagination of Marlowe and fill the space of the Rose to pull it
off, and Into the Breach were simply not up to the job.
I was slightly suspicious when Robert Lindsey highlighted not human
hubris but damned disappointment in his opening comments on A Devilish
Exercise: that Marlowe knew he was going to come to a bad end, and
that fatalism is what drove his works, the subtext being that to be
human is a damned and devilish thing, and the devils are the most important,
controlling aspects of Faustus and Marlowe's other works.
This is what actually happens in A Devilish Exercise, and off
the point though it would have been, if Mephistopheles and co had lived
up to their Don Corleone billing, it would have been an interesting
production, though one I would have disagreed with intellectually. The
devils are not the driving force of Marlowe's works; instead it is the
brilliant overreaching of humanity, human hubris that goes spectacularly
awry. The heroism of hubris, however, is something that our own miserabilist
times would rather ignore, even when it ends in a fine moral tale of
damnation.
And repression of this fist-shaking-at-the-gods arrogace produces neither
better heroes or better villains. The devils in A Devilish Exercise
really got on my tits - they were entirely preposterous and could
have lept right out of a Dungeons and Dragons board game, they were
that non-scary. The costumes - tights with twigs stuck on from where
I was sitting - kept reminding me of that Blake's Seven episode
where they land on a living planet and there is a parasite bird done
up rather like these devils. The ridiculousness of the devils' dress
was matched by the daftness of their direction. The lisping 'devilish'
speeches of Mephistopheles et al, accompanied by embarassingly inane
constant contortions, just distracted from Marlowe's words (and, hey,
those are kinda important). Nonetheless, I would rather have Marcia
Carr hamming it up as Mephistopheles than Angela Rauscher simply speaking
the lines as Dido. It's the sack of bleeding Troy not a Beverley
Hills 90210 pyjama party. Enough said.
Robert Curtis has the physical presence for Tamburlaine (nice chest,
love) but didn't quite have the vocal bite for the part - Into the Breach
Theatre have a habit I hope they lose soon of saying the words of a
play as they think they should be spoken rather than saying them with
the full felt force of their meaning and beauty. Richard Pryal as Bajazeth
and Rebecca Todd as Zabina raised the game and gave something of the
sort of felt performance that matters, particularly in performing such
a muscular work. Tom Frankland as Dr Faustus was adequate but again
I sometimes felt there was a lot of exclaiming going on with little
attention to feeling through the words, inhabiting the script.
All in all, A Devilish Exercise had all the ingredients to be
exciting and challenging, even dazzling. But it seems that Into the
Breach Theatre didn't have enough faith in their devilish exercise to
really push it to the limit. And that's a damned shame all round.
Run over.
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