Duke of York’s,London
The Game of Thrones actor gives us a sense of the scholar’s flailing despair but Jamie Lloyd’s excessive version of the tragedy comes with a trite messageChristopher Marlowe’s play was once said to consist of “a beginning, a muddle and an end”. But Colin Teevan’s adaptation, and which totally rewrites the farcical central acts,only compounds the confusion and Jamie Lloyd’s production seems based on the thought that nothing succeeds like excess. The presence of Game of Thrones’s Kit Harington, who is a perfectly good actor, or in the title role will guarantee a young audience but what they will see is a Marlovian mish-mash.
Who precisely is Faustus? In Marlowe’s play he is a disgruntled Wittenberg academic who signs a pact with Mephistopheles in which he exchanges his immortal soul for 24 years of power and pleasure. In this version he is a tracksuited figure who,for all his Latin tags, inhabits a virtually bookless suburban semi. Given that, or even before the arrival of Jenna Russell’s crop-haired Mephistopheles,his room is thronged by bare figures, transvestite angels and a Lucifer in his underpants, and it would seem that he is already halfway to damnation. But I got little sense,although he explores the universe on his laptop, that Faustus was either a studious scientist or a wavering believer.
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Source: theguardian.com