fools that will laugh on earth must weep in hell: doctor faustus

What better setting for Faustus’ hellish downfall than surrounded by books?

I couldn’t help thinking that to myself as I stood in Blackwell bookshop’s Norrington room, waiting for the show to start. Books of all varieties—kids’ books, textbooks, mass-market books—line the walls from floor to second-story ceiling. In the middle sits the stage: unassuming wood & cloth, nothing special.

Creation Theatre’s Doctor Faustus opens with books. Five pairs of hands around the stage, from underneath, slam down books and open them, leafing through the yellowing pages as the ensemble cast crawls onstage. A rhythmic, beatless sort of tribal dance ensues, the all-male cast treating the books themselves as idols to be revered. The play starts: the lead actor recites Faustus’ famed bored-with-everything speech while the rest of the cast sits, unassuming, browsing through the books that have now been left onstage. When Faustus quoted his Latin—from Logic, from Medicine, from Law, from Divinity—the silent readers would suddenly look up, fire in their eyes, and intone the Latin along with him. In identical exasperation, all five men would close their books with a loud slap and toss them to the side, starting on a new book together. The whole thing had an eerie, otherworldly feel: the audience was left unsure whether Faustus was moving the other members of the cast, or maybe they were moving him, or maybe some unseen force was moving them all. 

The scene where Lucifer presents Faustus with the seven deadly sins carried the same sense; part of me wanted to laugh at the foolishness of five grown men, three of whom wearing pantyhose on their heads, leaping about the stage. Part of me wanted to cry: the elaborate choreography really emphasised Faustus’ utter helplessness. Part of me felt the same acrid terror of Faustus. Still another part of me recognised in the strangeness of the scene my own distance from it, at which point their dance becomes just a dance. All the while, melody-less music beats cruelly in the background while Lucifer laughs.

The setting was simple but effective: the staging made excellent use of its trapdoors and one clever prop box. More than once I audibly yelped in fright at someone popping out of nowhere. The lighting, too, was straightforward but impeccable. Nearly every scene depended at some point or another upon a perfect light-cue being executed at the exact moment Mephistophilis stretches his hand out, and the hard-working lights operator must have put in some extra hours perfecting all of those prompts, since each was flawless.

Gus Gallagher made a brilliant Faustus: swaggeringly arrogant, even close to the end, but still somehow hollow—haunted. Gwynfor Jones, besides having a really cool name, was a stiff-armed, white-faced Mephistophilis; clad in an all-black suit, Jones’ portrayal of the somehow-sympathetic demon is characterised by sheer distance: distance from God. Distance from men. Distance from love, from humanity, from the audience.

To return to my original point, how flippin’ cool of a location is Blackwell’s? Especially in Oxford (Blackwell, for the uninitiated, is an Oxford bookshop, but they now have lots of locations across the UK), in Blackwell’s books are immaculately shiny, clean—almost, well, sacred. To watch Faustus kicking books, throwing them, ripping them apart felt like he’d committed sacrilege long before his pact with Lucifer. We live for books in this city: we base our lives around where we can find the books that we need. We complain about books and rejoice in books and have stacks of books on our desks up in the library at any given time. At some point, we have to look beyond the books into the real questions of the world, and then we have some options. A Faustus who had shunned his endless pursuit of knowledge in favour of God’s grace, for example, would have been saved and, as the good angel acknowledges, would have been filled with joy. Instead, we see a Faustus turned the other way: a Faustus who became disillusioned with his knowledgeable life and, swollen with pride, decided he could do better.

I will end as he did:

My God, my God! Look not so fierce on me!

Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!

Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!

I’ll burn my books—Ah! Mephistophilis!