The Devil, as we all know, not only has the best tunes but also the most unexpected guises. Who can forget Liz Hurley in a series of tight red numbers in the remake of Bedazzled or Jack Nicholson raising his arched eyebrows as a “horny little devil” in The Witches of Eastwick? At the National Theatre, the drink-addled Dublin characters of Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer are being visited by a well-dressed stranger who turns out to be Old Nick himself. So the Devil doesn’t just wear Prada.
Underlying all these appearances is the ultimate hire-purchase deal — all that you desire in life, paid for by eternal torment after death. It’s the Faust legend that, over the years, has prompted such diverse actors as Richard Burton, Jude Law and Simon Callow to sell their souls on stage. And now, as testimony toits enduring mythic appeal, three very different reinterpretations are opening over the next two weeks.
“Nowadays we’re all living in the moment, busy scrabbling for that 15 minutes of fame,” observes Felix Barrett, whose Punchdrunk company is staging a promenade version of Goethe’s Faust with the National Theatre. “It can be cheap, nasty and garish, and Faust goes for it without thinking of the consequences.”
For Rupert Goold, who has reworked Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus for a London production at Hampstead Theatre, the key is that “it’s hard to remain innocent in an information-rich age like ours. Faustus begins the play having learnt everything and wanting to know more, so he kind of goes online to find darker places than he ever imagined. He enters a world of ambition, sexuality and celebrity that’s very relevant today.”
And finally David Fielding, co-directing the Marlowe play with Jan-Willem van den Bosch at Bristol Old Vic, sees it as a modern morality play. “Its roots may lie in medieval notions of Heaven and Hell but over the years the drama has become a metaphor of personal compromise and instant gratification,” he says.
The Faust legend is rooted in tales of a real-life necromancer, Georg Faust, who became the subject of the German bestseller Faustbuch (1587), and then of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1588). This led to cautionary pantomime and puppet-play versions seen in Frankfurt by the young Goethe, who between 1770 and 1832 produced his huge two-part version.
“Goethe was a man of the Enlightenment so Faust’s intellectual ambitions are seen as noble and Faust himself as a redeemable figure,” van den Bosch says. “Religion is much more fundamental to Marlowe’s story. Faustus begins as a much younger man than Goethe’s and seems a more modern sinner.”
Each age remakes the Faustus legend in its own image. Gounod turned it into 19th-century romantic opera. Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947) dealt with the artist’s relation to Nazism. Vaclav Havel’s play Temptation (1986) was about life under communism. Randy Newman penned a 1996 rock musical that turned the learned Faustus into a slacker student who fails to check the contract with Satan because he won’t read anything “out of hours”.
Although Fielding and van den Bosch are using Marlowe’s text, their setting is contemporary and features actresses as Faustus and the satanic tempter Mephistopheles. While Helen of Troy provided hollow gratification for Marlowe’s hero, such modern-day icons as Marilyn Monroe now people the story. When Faustus indulges in unholy pranks involving the Pope, it’s at a G8 summit.
“In our secular age we no longer have an abiding sense of eternal damnation,” Fielding says. But, van den Bosch adds, “religion and fundamentalism are now very much part of our world again so Faustus’s sacrilege seems dangerously transgressive once again”.
Rupert Goold’s production intertwines Marlowe’s account of Renaissance sacrilege with a satiric fable about BritArt blasphemy involving Jake and Dinos Chapman and their defacement of the Goya etchings Disasters of War. Like Faustus, the brothers are damning themselves with their headline-grabbing actions.
“In the Nineties, intellectually and culturally, there was a playful, almost larky, spirit. You could see it in British art and music,” Goold says. “That all changed after 9/11. Pure irony was replaced by dogma and ideology. The Chapmans are very Marlovian because they break taboos, and the play is about challenging ideology so it’s more relevant than ever.”
Punchdrunk’s production turns Goethe’s Faust, in which the elderly academic is rejuvenated into a younger man and lusts after the peasant girl Gretchen, into a kind of installation adventure. You’re whisked away by minibus from the National Theatre to a disused six-storey building on an industrial estate where various scenes play out in a loop.
“It’s up to you to work your way through it,” Felix Barrett says. “We always throw the audience into the middle of things so it’s important to have characters they can empathise with. Goethe’s Faust is full of human frailty. His desire for Gretchen shows how irrational we act in what’s meant to be a rational world. And while Marlowe’s Faustus summons the Devil, in Goethe he appears unbidden — it’s as if Faustus senses in the Devil the dark secrets of his own soul.”
For actors, Faust and Mephistopheles offer two meaty parts but, in some cases, the title role has come to seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction. When Richard Burton played Marlowe’s Faustus at the Oxford Playhouse in 1966, with Elizabeth Taylor as Helen of Troy and a student supporting cast, critics pointed out how Burton, a giant of the classical stage, had sold his soul to Hollywood for fame and riches.
Jude Law played the same part at the Young Vic in 2002. At the time he was the golden boy of the movies. His Faustus showed what happens to someone who believes he can live forever in the spotlight.
For Goold, it’s the way that the legend acquires different meanings for each age and new generation that will keep Faustographers busy for years to come. “Temptation and power never lose their allure,” he says. For Barrett, the Faustian bargain raises questions for which we’ll always want answers: “What is the trade-in value of a human soul? What would you expect for yours?”
Punchdrunk’s Faust, National Theatre, London (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk 020-7452 3000), opens Oct 17; Doctor Faustus, Hampstead Theatre, NW3 (www.hampsteadtheatre.com 020-7722 9301), Oct 20-Nov 18; Doctor Faustus, Bristol Old Vic, (www.bristol-old-vic.co.uk 0117 987 7877), Oct 27-Nov 25
