The world: larger than expected

[fivemack]

Cambridge is a proverbially small place; anything you do, you expect to run into someone from a completely different context doing it. So I was surprised yesterday when this didn't happen.

Kit Marlowe was born about 450 years ago; the Cambridge Marlowe Society, which was founded 107 years ago, is putting on all Marlowe's plays this year in celebration. Last night was Dr Faustus; I'd never seen it performed - I'd never read it - and so I went along out of curiosity.

It started with a wince-inducing undergraduate-luvvies prologue: obviously deliberately designed to induce wincing, but that's not what I go to the theatre for, so I was relieved when it segued into actual Marlowe. It's definitely of Shakespeare's time; it had something of the Hamlet nature where the best lines had become cliches disconnected from the play - "This is Hell, nor am I out of it" "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships". Very good leads; I thought the interaction of lusty Faustus with a silent Helen of Troy who absolutely showed in face and poise how little she wanted to be there was particularly well-done.

I was surprised how bitty it felt: it had the comic-relief scenes that, presumably, an Elizabethan audience expected - I have no idea what mix of comedy and horror a 1595 audience would have felt at Faustus slapping the Pope, but I'm fairly sure the scene where two rustics steal a goblet, taunt an innkeeper, vex Mephistopheles and get turned into ape and dog was nothing but comic relief - but they didn't fit in with the rest of the play in the way that Shakespeare sometimes offered. A bit of me felt that the story would work well as over-the-top cinema - there is a Burton-and-Taylor film from 1967, but it's a film of a stage production rather than something with Cecil B deMille production design.

Really a good evening; if you're in Cambridge without plans, there are plenty of seats for the 2:30 matinee, and some (quite a long way back) for the 7:45 still available today.

Comments

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

1595 was a) definite Protestant territory and b) a decade post-Armada. I doubt most of the audience would be horrified by a bit of Pope bashing...

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Is Faustus the one with the horse that vanishes if you take it into a river? I remember thinking that bit was particularly incongruous.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Yes, that one. It seemed as if that must have been a way to show off some stagecraft with a bottle and a horse - the Doctor transforms the bottle into the horse on-stage without saying anything specifically, sells the horse with the dire warning, and then you get the horse-courser coming in and complaining that the horse had vanished under him.

Last night's production was fairly sparse props-wise - the set was three rectangular things with doors in the front, moved on castors and variously lit - but I was imagining someone writing with a full set of stage equipment to show off.

But maybe my Elizabethan stagecraft owes a lot to Terry Pratchett in Wyrd Sisters; Hwel would so have written such a scene upon finding a trick horse in the props-room.

[(Anonymous)]

I was annoyed to be away last week and miss it; their Dido, Queen of Carthage in Emma chapel last year was pretty damn good (well, apart from Aeneas who I though didn't get some of the verse over well). But, I suppose, if you have to miss one, it may as well be the one which gets done fairly often (I saw the Globe production a few years ago, but it stuck firmly to the A text and so didn't have, for example, the 'see where Christ's blood streams' speech, which is pretty much the heart of the whole thing so it always confused me when people leave it out; how could it not be Marlowe?); whereas how often do you get to see a Dido?

I look forward to their Tamburlaine and especially their Jew of Malta, being the one I have performed in myself.