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Post by Jan on Sept 12, 2022 8:10:58 GMT
Anyone seen this yet ? Reviews are very mixed.
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Post by cavocado on Sept 12, 2022 16:19:32 GMT
Anyone seen this yet ? Reviews are very mixed. Yes, but I haven't seen or read the original for about 20 years and can't remember it in detail. It was enjoyable, but I suspect purists might wince. It's 90 minutes, so I imagine there was a lot cut, no sub-plots, also some bits added, mainly songs, e.g. the seven deadly sins have a song and dance number complete with inflatable penis. It felt like a lot of the character development and the dark emotional stuff was lacking, not much menace or moral bankruptcy, but a misguided man fulfilling his dreams with the help of his Sir Humphrey-like devil-servant. At its worst it felt like a comic revue on the theme of god v the devil. Maybe it's hard to get modern audiences to see menace in a play which relies on belief in the devil and hell, but the scenes where Faustus is torn over whether to repent seemed incongruous when the devilry was so focused on comedy. Much blood and gore if that bothers anyone. All that said, it was an entertaining and fast-paced hour and a half, and I enjoyed Mephistopheles as the devil's supercilious civil servant. It was good to see a Shakespeare contemporary play for the first time in ages, so for me it was worth seeing (especially if you have PAYG at Southwark which is only £12 a ticket). |
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Post by Jan on Sept 12, 2022 16:45:54 GMT
Anyone seen this yet ? Reviews are very mixed. It's 90 minutes, so I imagine there was a lot cut, no sub-plots, also some bits added, mainly songs, e.g. the seven deadly sins have a song and dance number complete with inflatable penis. The text for this play is a mess - for a start there are two different versions: one is short and the other is not particularly long so they might not have cut much. I've never seen it run much over 2hrs including an interval. It always seems to me like there are bits missing and the timescale is odd, a director really needs to assemble their own version to make it at least partially coherent. I'm not in favour of giant inflatable penises though, it's very old fashioned, when Peter Brook first introduced one in Oedipus in 1968 it had some shock value but surely not now. |
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Post by cavocado on Sept 12, 2022 19:19:09 GMT
That's interesting - I need to read the text(s). I agree that inflatable penises have lost their shock value! Also being used at The Globe's Henry VIII, so not even the first of 2022.
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Post by Jan on Sept 12, 2022 19:37:38 GMT
That's interesting - I need to read the text(s). I agree that inflatable penises have lost their shock value! Also being used at The Globe's Henry VIII, so not even the first of 2022. The Globe are repeat offenders, they had one in The Oresteia in 2015 too - maybe the same one, they had it handy … |
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