Doctor Faustus (RSC, Barbican, 28 September)

Less there there than I had wanted. The idea of two actors gaming at the beginning to trade off Faust and Mephistopheles is interesting, but in practice doesn't really yield anything; neither portrayal was particularly distinctive, save that one had a Scottish accent and one didn't. I had read reviews, and so was expecting the box thing at the beginning--maybe without them, this would have seemed odder. But this production only seemed truly strange or powerful during the Helen sequence, when the two characters' motions suggested presences in the grip of something truly odd and powerful. On the train to work the next morning, this slip of a character registers with me nearly as much as either of the two principals. 

For much of its run, this reminded me of last year's Everyman at the NT--another play that reaches back to the pagaent drama, and another production uncertain of what to do with its spectacle sequences. I regard that Everyman as one of the great wasted opportunities of recent Lodon theatre; this was nothing like as epic a fail. But many of the sequences that made up the running of the play--the delights, or demonstrations of power, that Mephistopheles brings to Faust--just kind of sat there. The Seven Deadly Sins sang an awkward, faintly Brecht-y--Contemporary London Brecht--song. The Pope's friars did an absolutely witless, vaguely Sound of Music dance. One of these sequences puts actors in these elaborate, bloated caricature costumes; but then another, unrelated one does as well, exhausting the not-all-that-great-in-the-first-instance effect. Some of this exhaustion seemed to be the point: the play is suggesting pretty strongly that these presences are simply stage illusions conjured up by Faustus. And fair enough. But the play throughout also registers a lack of interest in stage illusions: a trip throughout Europe, for example, registered by Mephistopheles writing out the names of European cities in chalk, finishing with "Etc." as Faustus' demands for travel continue. As in Everyman, we wind up in a posture familiar on the post-everything London stage: we're clearly not taking the material seriously, but we don't have anything else to justify what we're doing. Maybe we should have been doing the Goethe version--but, like, dude: it's your production.

There was powerful stuff here. The pentagram that Faust draws, and its gradual accretion of matter from the various sequences that follow, is striking--although I think it says something that I'm remembering a drawing on the stage more clearly than some of the elaborate dance sequences. Faustus' acting in the first few minutes, when the actor accepted the part and matter-of-factly started speaking, pointed towards a much more engaging production: more streamlined, more focused on Faustus, more psychologically pure. What followed--not helped by the cavernous Barbican stage--was unfocused and mostly exhausted.