DR FAUSTUS remains as much an enigma as ever in, or in spite of, John Barton's
production with Ian McKellen in the main role. Indeed, one seems confronted with
two enigmas, first the play itself, with all its complexities and
contradictions, not the least its highly unsatisfactory text,
episodic and largely irrelevant comic
scenes, which Barren has omitted; and
now there is the enigma of what Barron
has done with Dr Faustus in performance, not primarily in the way he has reshaped
it, but more in his view of the play as it
comes through in McKellen's interpretation, in the use of Bunraku puppets for
the parade of Deadly Sins, Helen of Troy, together with the miniature Good ad Bad Angels.
Barton has worked out his textual changes, to deal with these first, to make Dr Faustus more uniform, and to give it the single setting of Faustus's study. To this end he has, as he states, changed the locations or three scenes, and left out one. He has added a number of lines from the English Faust-Book which are very undramatic, but they serve to chronicle the missing links in the narrative. In addition he has provided, notably one long lively scene, presumably his own, from a few lines in the original. This is the scene in which the Duchess of Vanholt indulges in bawdy horseplay with Faustus under her husband's nose. The Duchess is played by an actress not a puppet, and the relief, titillation, as well as exuberant playing from McKellen and Jean Gilpin (the Duchess) is, at this point two thirds of the way through, considerable. The concentration on Faust and Mephistopheles needs lightening.
Whether Barton's tailoring is an improvement on the original should next be asked. If Marlowe, as is claimed, wrote only some seven or eight hundred lines out of the two thousand which have come down to us in various texts, it must be reckoned that he had not the time, inclination, or ability to do justice to the rest. But it was his choice--it must have been to--to pad it out with some unprogressive foolery, serving to heighten expectation for the next burst of sinful pageant, the next sweep of mighty lines which bore his stamp. The text is 'calculatedly ambivalent', as Anne Barton writes in the Programme, in a way additional in the religious contradictions she rightly specifies. The character Faustus is not a very individual creation, and instead of being tantalised with the incompleteness, a deliberate incompleteness, in Marlowe's version, one is made, in Barton's version, to confront inadequacies which might otherwise pass unnoticed.
Them is no doubt in putting all the attention on to Faustus, and in not allowing his audience to be distracted from him, Barton gives McKellen an impossible task. This, in my opinion, he acquits himself of badly. In the early part when Faustus's curiosity is seen to consume him, MeKellen leaps about the set in a highly unrealistic manner, contorting his frame. introducing strange throbbing inflections into his voice. It is all highly mannered work, absolutely running counter to the tasteful and meticulous detail, the dozen or so different kinds of chairs assembled on every level in every alcove, of the vaulted study; it also, more importantly, runs counter to Emrys James' measured and demurely precise Mephostopheles. McKellen's performance is full of tormented mannerism, summoned possibly to sustain him through the exacting task Barton has set him. Though his delivery of some of the finer verse is cunningly modulated, and though some of the slower sections when Faust it ageing register more convincingly than the rest, this is far from being one of McKellen's best performances. I believe passionately in heroic acting, but Faustus' study as designed by Michael Annals--a marvellously claustrophobic and atmospheric design--is not the place for it.
The introspective attitude which the puppets establish does not help McKellen either. The puppets, one assumes, show that even the vanities of the flesh, the most supreme concept of earthly beauty, namely Helen of Troy, are merely figments of the mind, and therefore it does not matter unduly how they are represented. They could as easily be pieces of tinfoil or disembodied voices. If this is so, and this Barton's aim, then it confuses one to read in the programme the historical account by Patrick Tucker of Faustus performed as a puppet play. Faustus and Mephostopheles may more easily be envisaged as puppets than Helen of Troy, for it is for it is Faustus' soul that is being jerked on the end or a string, not the nature of temptation. Although use of such an interesting and imaginative device on the stage is to be applauded, the puppets are a further contradiction in style. It is as if Baudelaire's debauched images were to be removed in favour of Sarte's aphorisms.
All this may sound as though one was not intrigued by Barton's production, which
could not be further
from the truth. But one could not but feel overall an uneasiness of style, from the mistaken though very
understandable desire to unify and bring coherence to Dr Faustus.