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Danny Lee Wynter as
Mephistopheles, Jodie McNee as Faustus and Barnaby Power as Lucifer.
Pictures: Manuel Harlan
Faustus: That Damned Woman
Birmingham Rep
**
Faustus that Dammed woman, is Chris
Bush’s bold but mostly reductive retelling of Marlowe’s date with the
devil and a man who sells his soul for a lifetime of hedonistic
pleasure.
Here we begin in the 17th century and witness a
young girl, Johanna Faustus who is traumatised by the knowledge that her
mother was wrongly executed by men as a witch. Johanna summons the
devil, in the shape of Barnaby Power, and exchanges her soul for 144
years to be taken in any year or century ahead in time, thereby giving
her the ability to leap thousands of years to examine the world and gain
the knowledge to right all of its wrongs.
It has the basis of great potential and indeed
there are moments of very expressive theatre but largely we are left
with a confusing muddle of Bill and Ted time stops, highlighting a
couple of notable women of science whose success was no thank to the
severe limitations imposed on them by Men.
The first is Elizabeth Garrett the first woman
doctor, battling the male establishment for acceptance into the medical
profession. The second is two times recipient of the Nobel Prize
physicist Marie Curie. Here we are reminded that although a gifted
scientist she was not allowed to vote.
Emmanuella Cole who takes on a variety of roles including Dr
Elizabeth Garrett
Furthermore Bush divisively depicts her as
brilliant but serving wife who puts her husband Pierre’s work ahead of
hers, where in truth it was her husband who said he would give up his
work just to be with her.
There’s no time to hear about anyone else as from
there we fly hundreds and then thousands of years into the future.
Faustus has opened an institute for computing and plans to mind map the
world. In one scene she echoes a Lord Sugar type, berating a young woman
employee for leaving her job to tend to her sick mother thankfully she’s
not fired.
Overall this retelling is an interesting but
highly personalised and narrow concept. To create some needed balance
Johanna is not exactly pure herself with outbursts of drunken debauchery
and violence, all in the quest for power and knowledge.
However other than a lot of historical finger
wagging about facts we already know, and reminders that `it’s a man’s
world’. there is no effective conclusion. For all of her acquired
knowledge, Miss Faustus ends up in the same place she starts, did she
dream it or is she mad, we don’t know.
Putting aside the content there are some superb
performances. Jodie Mcnee spends most of the time in energetic
disbelief, sprinting about, passionately campaigning against and for her
ambition to heal the world. Danny Lee Wynter is the elegant
Mephistopheles, escorting Faustus through the centuries and the
instrument of her will, all done foppishly with a wave of his lace
handkerchief and a devil may care laugh. Alicia Charles takes on several
roles as does Emmanuella Cole and both showed exceptional range.
Director Caroline Byrne resolves to some basic
frozen tableaus to affect the time travel passage’s with an assortment
of projected images on to an adventurous conical shaped set that
unfortunately restricts viewers in the auditorium seating extremes. It
was frustrating to not be able to fully see all the action and this
really is an unforgivable design error.
This retelling is more of a conversation piece as
to `what if’ rather than is able to offer us any solutions, as Johana
ultimately fails in her attempts for change. However we get it we
understand. Women have been marginalised, we need to do better, we are
making change happen. If only we had a time machine and could travel
forward a thousand years to find out what happens? To 07-03-20.
Jeff Grant
26-02-20
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