The world: larger than expected
Feb. 1st, 2014 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackCambridge 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.
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.
