Let’s see what we’ve got. We’ve got Dr Faustus himself, coming on stage near a skull which is where the tea will later be kept, (instigating a Hamlet joke – two teas or not to two teas), summoning up Mephistopholes who appears, Caliban stylee, in rags and dirty make-up. Then we’ve got the Chapman Brothers, laid back provocateurs of the art world. And isn’t that Matthew Collings who wrote a book about them all? And last but not least, there’s a refugee from Afghanistan whose brother was beheaded by the Taliban….How’s all this going to come together?
The fact that it doesn’t really might be less important than the fact that the director/ writer thought it worth a try. Just as the Chapmans ‘rectified’ Goya, so Goold is ‘rectifying’ Marlowe’s Faustus, chopping up the text, adding his irreverent take to it. Goold is commenting on the Chapman brothers commenting on Goya who’s not really commenting on the Faust legend commenting on Hell. Which is also a work by the Chapman brothers.
Faustus and the Chapmans paths only cross once, in the aftermath of their failure to win the Turner prize. The lights are going on and off in homage to Creed, and Faustus wanders through, stuck in his perpetual torment, whilst the Chapmans discuss the beauty of simplicity in art. A dangerous tactic. I found it hard not to think there might have been more tension if the Chapmans and Faust had had a dramatic reason for being in the same room, rather than a theoretical one. A note which carried through the whole play – it’s a nice enough device, pitting the enfants terrible against the daddy of enfants terrible, but unless the two stories genuinely crash into each other, rather than merely poetically allude to one another, it’s hard to see how this in any way ‘rectifies’ the original.
As a consequence, what you get is stripped down Faustus, the edge taken off it. Where a contemporary audience might have been terrified/ fascinated by Faustus’ incantations of magical spells, to a modern audience it feels like so much Shakespearianism. Faustus’ delight in the powers Mephistopheles grants him gets lost, and his tale is reduced to an ongoing dialogue with the disconnected anti-christ.
The artworld scenes work better. The interplay between the Chapmans operates on a suitably deadpan note. They have a narrative – the journey from Turner also-rans to cultural heretics, even if Helena’s interjections leading to Jake’s disquietude seems contrived. Yet their tampering with the Goya etchings hardly comes across as a damnable action, (especially as its artistic effectiveness is on show in the lobby, where the actual Chapman/ Goya works can be seen – although it was interesting to note that the night I was there, no-one was paying them a blind bit of notice), and whilst Faustus sees his soul streaming into the heavens, the audience knows that the Chapmans will face nothing worse than marginal notoriety and relative wealth.
As I left the theatre into a rainy Swiss Cottage night, I overheard someone saying it was a real actors piece. This seemed accurate, though it’s also a director’s piece, a design piece, even an artists piece. It feels like one of those shows where the parts are more than the sum of the whole. This may be the result of some kind of Faustian pact the director has made in over-reaching himself. If so, it’s more of a virtue than a vice. Even though we get two plays for the price of one, and though I question the use of a Taliban victim’s supposed testimony being appropriated in the name of art - (another line the play fitfully explores is the meaning of cruelty and art’s capacity to capture that thing) – Goold’s play is consistently, though never sensationally, thought-provocative.
Nb: No play will ever illustrate Martin Creed’s minor masterpiece as effectively as this; probably the most striking usage of a Turner prize winning work the London stage has seen.
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