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Faustus plays devil’s advocate
FAUSTUS
Hampstead Theatre
THIS reworking of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is rather like the wacky world of Brit Art that director Rupert Goold’s has chosen to dissect. At times intriguing, it left me bamboozled.
The devil-obsessed John Faustus is perhaps our literary canon’s number one know it all. The learned scholar has read the lot but, craving experience, sells his soul to the devil.
The night begins with Faustus bored by religious texts and philosophy, warming seductively to the dark arts.
But just as he prepares to raise Lucifer’s minion Mephistopheles, here played by Jake Maskall who played Danny Moon in Eastenders, the action jumps into the subterranean fields of 21st-century Hoxton.
Two prodigal sons of the Brit Art movement are plotting a cataclysmic act of cultural vandalism.
The Chapman brothers, famed for their enormous tableau of over 5,000 mutilated Nazi soldiers and a collection of primitive masks plastered with burger chain McDonald’s logos, plan to “rectify” works by the revolutionary 19th-century artist Francisco de Goya replacing the faces of mutilated bodies with hand-painted cartoon heads.
This is not fiction – it happened in 2003. The purchase of the Goya paintings is their pact with the devil.
Themes of beauty, pain, fame and solitude collide as Faustus appears at the brothers’ 2004 Turner Prize defeat, where hell’s characters are on display. The brothers, who lose to an installation where lights switch on and off, learn a lesson in simplicity and this complex production could have taken some of its own advice.
Somewhere in the confusion, Goold’s script makes bold statements about our information-rich age and shows us how Marlowe’s indictment of ambition, sexuality and celebrity remains relevant today.
But the idea was overwhelming and despite excellent performances from Maskall as the stilted Mephistopheles and Stephen Noonan and Jonjo O’Neill as the conniving brothers, the night suffered from a lack of coherency.
The Hampstead Theatre has long been a champion of new writing and a breeding ground for new ideas.
But as this probe into the brief history of Brit Art movement shows there is a big difference between original ideas and playing devil’s advocate.
Until Nov 18
020 7722 9301
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