On paper, it sounds a fine idea: to film all the plays by Christopher Marlowe with star casts including Dominic West, Alan Cox, Talulah Riley, Nancy Carroll and the late, great Adrian Schiller. It is the brainchild of a producer-director, Ray Mia, who clearly has a passion for Marlowe. But having seen a video recording of Doctor Faustus at – where else? – the Marlowe theatre in Canterbury, and dipped into the versions of Tamburlaine and The Massacre at Paris, I find myself wondering who it is all for? In an age when Eng Lit is being marginalised as a subject of academic study, is the world aching for a massive Marlowe marathon?
The project was unusually conceived. In 2022 the Malthouse theatre at the King’s School, Canterbury – Marlowe’s alma mater – was taken over by actors, directors and musicians to present all of Marlowe’s plays. The idea was to rehearse each one for four days and then to do script-in-hand performances on the Friday and Saturday before a live audience (I am told three people turned up for the Saturday matinee of Tamburlaine). Mia lays great stress on the use of “immersive audio technology”. But, slightly to the surprise of the cast and directors, a video recording was also made of the performances; and it was this version of Doctor Faustus that I saw last week.
Mia said at a preliminary Q&A that “it was all about capturing the jeopardy”. And I should say, in fairness, that with a strong cast and a good director (in this case, Phillip Breen) it is possible to do a decent, hastily rehearsed version of a classic play. Dominic West was a lively, endlessly inquisitive Faustus, Talulah Riley (the former Mrs Elon Musk) was a beguiling Mephistopheles who sinuously metamorphosed into Helen of Troy and, for once, the central farcical scenes came off well. Ben Roddy made use of his experience as a pantomime dame to lend the clownish Robin a goofy, gangling vigour and Forbes Masson made his mark whether as a geriatric pope or a toothless temptress.
But, for all the talk of “immersive audio”, all I can say is that the text came across clearly without much spatial variation. As a visual experience, however, it was dismal. The show seemed to be recorded on a single camera halfway back in the auditorium so we saw the action in permanent mid-shot. I longed for closeups of West especially so that we could savour the remorse of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil. In the age of NT Live and screened opera, we are used to sophisticated camera angles that take us inside the experience. This was more like the kind of primitive visual record that theatres used to make for their own archival purposes.
I am wary of attacking a project that was ambitiously conceived. But, looking at the 92-page digital programme that accompanies the season, it struck me that it is full of what Marlowe himself called “high astounding terms”. Mia tells us that Marlowe was “a poor kid who came from nowhere”. According to the scholar John Jump, he was actually “the son of a fairly prosperous Canterbury shoemaker”. We also learn that “he was the Jim Morrison of English drama” although the only real point of comparison is that they both died in their late 20s.
There is also an element of vainglory when Mia talks of creating a Miarist theatre performance which is “a deconstructed (con)textual drama with no set and no visual on stage parameters”. In simpler terms, this is the kind of minimalist theatre we have been experiencing for decades. I have no doubt Mia means well but, after seeing Doctor Faustus and glancing at two of the other productions, I am reminded that the perennial theme of Marlowe’s plays is the peril awaiting the overreaching hero.
• The Marlowe Sessions is at the Marlowe theatre, Canterbury, until 24 August
