The original Dr Faustus
is a hybrid, a mixture of comedy, slapstick and satire with high tragedy.
Bearing in mind it is five hundred years old, it has lasted remarkably well.
Faustus was a man of his time, literally a 'Renaissance man', an over-reacher,
a prototype for what Montaigne's Essays and Shakespeare's character,
Hamlet, have in mind in relation to man's infinite possibilities and terrible
limitations. Of course, this theme as relevant as ever. So is the central
action of the play, in which Faustus sells his soul to the devil, in exchange
for twenty years of being able to do and get anything he wants, via the
services of the devil's agent on earth, Mephistopheles. A Mephistophelian
bargain, we still say, meaning a disastrous one, an exchange in which we give
everything for little in return. It was an idea Christopher Marlowe, the play's
author, got from an earlier German pamphlet, called the Faustbuch
What has made Dr Faustus amongst the best-loved of
plays in English, though, is the quality of the language, of Faustus's
heart-breaking rhetoric and the menace and desolation of his dialogues with
Mephistopheles. Robert Lewis's radical recasting of the play, notably replacing
a great deal of dramatic language with physical and vocal expression, is
therefore at first glance a risky undertaking.
How does this new version
recast Marlowe's? It has a new title, 'Profuge', deriving from the word
'fugue'. Musically-speaking, a fugue is a composition using several voices or
parts gradually building to a strong climax. The 'voices' in Profuge are
provided by the actors, in combination with sounds from Greenwood's leather
harp, borrowed from the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston. The harp is played by a small team of musicians
who follow a carefully developed, improvised program integral to the
performance. From the earliest rehearsals, musicians, actors and Lewis as
writer/director used the harp as an essential tool and the plan was always that
it should be play a prominent role, both in terms of sound and visual
appearance, in performance. In psychiatry, fugue describes a period during
which a person 'suffers from a loss of memory, often begins a new life' and
subsequently 'remembers nothing of the amnesiac phrase'. Lost memory and a new
start relate disturbingly to the plight of the central character who has two
'new' starts, the first, the twenty years of knowledge and power provided by
Lucifer and Mephistopheles, the second, entry to hell, after which any of the previous
twenty years of excitement and pleasure will cease to mean anything at all,
except as the price Faustus has paid. The new title, therefore, signals the
work's thematic continuities and technical innovations.
Marlowe's text has been
reduced by well over fifty per cent in Profuge and actors play multiple
parts, a common practice for VTL productions and other small ensembles.
Portions of the original text that remained after initial cutting are often
subject to further modification so that, for instance, in delivering a speech,
Faustus will enunciate only the consonants in every word. This creates a
staccato effect overlaying his decisions and acts with internal doubt and
confusion. Tension and conflict between characters in the Marlowe's text are represented
in Profuge by dramatic, sometimes violent physical gesture. Over six
years, VTL has developed a palette of techniques to evoke strong physicality,
adapted to meet the needs of individual texts as in this case. Another element
in the final production is the organisation of actors' movements on stage.
Lewis uses the word blocking to cover a process that continues and movies
virtually up to the dress rehearsal and final run. However, blocking isn't
really adequate to describe something that takes in complicated directions in
relation to music and movement, as well as speech. A better word for this is
choreography.
The final production is, in
fact, a combination of modern dance, ballet and melody, in addition to dramatic
language. After Faustus, the Chorus is given the longest speeches from the
original text to deliver. Lines from other characters have also been given to
the Chorus -- introducing new levels of complexity within the interplay of
characters. Primarily, the Chorus provides a kind of narrative anchor to guide
the audience, a function important in the original play and particularly so in
Lewis's reformulated script.
It seems relevant here to
quote Robert Daly from a recent 'Life and Style' section of The Age. Commenting
on the process of collaboration between composer and librettist in adapting a
novel to production as an opera, Daly writes: "As long as the narrative
context is clear, it's best to be subtly indirect; that allows the music to be
emotionally quite specific and direct". Although spoken word and movement
play a more prominent role in Profuge, I think this beautifully
suggests the way Lewis's text in performance aims to use gesture, music and
movement to get inside the consciousness of the audience in non-verbal ways in
more penetrating ways than simple text is able to.
Classic drama in the English
tradition poses its own challenge to directors wanting to work broadly within the
terms of the received script. I don't know how Elizabethan audiences dealt with
the appearance of Lucifer or the sight of Faustus being carried off to hell at
the play's end. Hellfire was more literally accepted then than now but costume
and scenery were always representational devices and at that time pretty basic
ones, too. These days, hell and the devil are mostly the territory of
fundamentalism and cults so, with the exception of radio drama, it's even more
important for directors have to avoid thunder-and-lightening theatricalism that
distracts from the sheer terror of Doctor Faustus' concluding lines. Robert
Lewis's solution is to create a new kind of theatre in which to perform
Marlowe's text. Profuge remains true to the spirit of Marlowe's play at
the same time representing an extraordinary new exploration of possibilities
invested in it.
Andrew Peek
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