WHEN Marlowe's Faustus initially turns to conjuring, he has subservient demons in mind, not card tricks.
In this cunningly up-dated co-production by the Citizens and West Yorkshire Playhouse, the nerdy bookish Faustus sells his soul – and presto! he becomes a celebrity magician, a cabaret-conjurer who is himself conned by the superficial glitz of his showbiz career. In order to make this contemporary play on illusions collude with Marlowe's scenario of folly and hedonism, writer Colin Teevan has replaced the play's original mid-section with a racily topical version (of Acts Three and Four) that sees Faustus truly lose himself, and his grip on reality, in the smoke and mirrors of theatrical make-believe.
We never really see him in centre-stage mode. Instead director Dominic Hill has Faustus play out his downfall in the messy, transient world of the dressing-room where shape-shifting and transformation is a profession. For Mephistopheles it is the stuff of his hellish eternity. For Siobhan Redmond, however, it's a triumph of many roles in one: her accent hints seductively at Dietrich – think Blue Angel, not just fallen angel – while as Faustus's "glamorous assistant" she gets to strut shades of Jessica Rabbit and Rita Hayworth's Gilda. There is an elegant menace to her and yet, as a deluded Faustus (Kevin Trainor) starts to flail about like a greedy child in a sweet-shop of forbidden pleasures, it's Redmond's Mephistopheles that voices, with poignant dignity, just what it is that Faustus craved and destroyed: true love on earth and bliss in Paradise.
His time runs out in a vividly raucous blitz of Vegas-style floor-shows, drunken parties and brutally casual sex. Life, old chum, isn't a rehearsal... this astutely provocative take on Marlowe is a pungent reminder of that.
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