Let Law cast a spell on you

10 April 2012

With a mighty sneer in his voice and no end of defiant fury Jude Law, took a one-way ticket to hell last night. And what a compelling two-hour trip he made of it, even though he didn't manage to have quite enough fun on the way or sufficiently panic as the clock ticked towards a hell-fire rendezvous at midnight.

Dressed in the morose black garb and beard of an Elizabethan scholar, Law was, of course, caught up in the frightening, 16th century world-picture of Christopher Marlowe and the role of that rebellious scholar with a cause, Dr John Faustus.

The role of Faustus, who dabbles in magic, raises a messenger from hell and sells his soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of voluptuousness, ought be ideal for a young movie hero of Law's calibre. After all, a Hollywood contract, regularly flashed in front of the likes of him, offers today's equivalent of Faustus's deal with Mephistopheles. Law, who is reported to be earning just £285 a week to appear in the production, duly plays the learned doctor with all the arrogant assurance of an angry young man who knows his own mind and doesn't take hell too seriously. But his performance is rather wedded to a single mood of vehement conceit. It also comes uncomfortably close to the one he gave on film as Lord Alfred Douglas - the aristocrat who loaned his soul and body - to Oscar Wilde.

Law's acting, though, injects regular shots of energy into a production by David Lan that makes heavy comic weather of Dr Faustus's black comedy and its satire. The staging is sensational, but not atmospheric, except when Murray Gold's sad music resounds. Designer Richard Hudson creates a bare, high, narrow platform stage that cuts its way across the auditorium, with an audience ranged on either side. There's no sense of place or time when Law's Elizabethan Faustus and Richard McCabe's superlative Mephistopheles, wreathed in melancholia, set out on their epic pleasure journey. Fortunately McCabe's lost soul, at first dressed like a bellboy at a smart London hotel and later in modish red jacket, rivets attention, with his sinister calm and understated bitterness.

The minuscule cast of supporting players is far too farcical when acting up as angels, spirits and magicians. They don't know whether to be serious or silly. Faustus's mocking high-jinks at the expense of a gluttonous Pope (mysteriously played by a woman) and his tricks in the presence of a dim Holy Roman Emperor are unfairly dull. Law's comic touch is also too limp. There's not even a frisson of sex to make the production voluptuous. For when Helen of Troy is supposed to shimmer across the stage there's no sighting of the famous face - or body.

Instead Law's Faustus just stares, entranced, into a mirror, as if to show he's a victim of acute narcissism. And when spirits, representing each of the seven deadly sins, scamper down the stage, Faustus himself aptly takes on the role of Pride. At least you cannot miss the glare of his character-flaws. Sadly Law does not rise to the thunder and lightening moments of terror at the finale. Yet whether you take Dr Faustus as a warning shot for non-believers or a rallying cry for atheists, play and production still cast a spell of the non-magical sort for our own Godless times.

Enterprise 09: Faustus

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