Review of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (Directed by Ricky Dukes for the Lazarus Theatre Company) at the Southwark Playhouse, London, 3 September 2022

Abstract

The Southwark Playhouse was scheduled to move in 2020, but Covid put that on hold and the theatre is still a few doors down from the Salvation Army, making it a pleasingly ironic location for Lazarus Theatre ’ s powerful, pacy production of Doctor Faustus. The story opened quietly enough in a study equipped with three tables, anglepoise lamps, a desk telephone of the kind my parents had and the same lever arch fi les as I used at school, which made the hero feel like a contemporary to me but presumably dated him for younger audience members. I was reminded of the Royal Shakespeare Company ’ s Tamburlaine , where the King of Fez ’ s Tommy Cooper joke amused the over-fi fties but left the rest of the audience stone cold; such nods to the relatively recent past are obviously partly to do with the demographic that can a ff ord to go to the theatre regularly, but I wonder if they also have the e ff ect of making Marlowe seem a fi gure who is old but not that old, someone who feels like part of a history that we can still recognise as within living memory. For me there was a similar sense of deliberate connection to the past when the production opened with a man clad only in underpants walking slowly and deliberately across the stage with a fully-dressed Faustus following at some distance behind like a vignette of human evolution, in a way which glances at the question of whether ‘ stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man ’ (1.1.63) is a testament to Renaissance humanist ambition or an ironic comment on how little Faustus actually achieves.