CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
" The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus." By Christopher Marlowe. (New.)
FAUSTUS sold his soul and his body to the Devil in return for twenty-four years of power and pleasure. It is no longer as likely a story as it seemed to the Elizabethans, but as Marlowe tells it, in verse which leaps at times into unforgettable incandescence, it still deserves a hearing on the stage. The play, which after all was written by a very young man, is full of faults and puerilities, but for these we come prepared to make allowances. What we do not expect to have to condone is a total failure to present either the drama or the poetry in Faustus himself.
Faustus has bartered his immortal soul. He savours unimagined delights, consorts with the Princes of Hell, navigates upon the backs of dragons and as the sands run out looks forward with horror to the most dreadful of perditions. It is simply no good to play him as if he were a retired detective inspector having a flutter in the black market,, and this, I am afraid, is what Sir Cedric Hardwicke does. Composed (until the very end), rather sceptical, incisive, and laconic in the quality if not the quantity of his speech, this Faustus is as much a stranger to passion as to poetry. He grows no older as the twenty-four years flitter by ; he betrays a mild satisfaction at his supernatural powers, a polite interest in the phenomena they enable him to evoke, a vague uneasiness about what is going to come of all this : so that in the end one is left wondering whether this soul of his, which they are all making such a fuss about, ever really existed at all. One cannot say that Sir Cedric acts badly ; he gives a perfectly competent performance of a totally different part.
The rest of Mr. John Burrell's production is ingenious though rather slow. There are plenty of devils and trap-doors and flashes and clouds of smoke ; and there are too many (by seven) of the Seven Deadly Sins, but I suppose it would hardly be proper to omit them. Mr. Robert Eddison is a good Mephistopheles, though I think that his preoccupation with his own inner torments would gain rather than lose if he showed at times those flashes of gleeful malevolence which one expects from even the most introspective devil. His friend wears such a consistently stricken look that he might almost be waiting for Landseer to paint him. The others have little chance to distinguish themselves, and the play goes forward lamely, burdened with a deadweight which it ought not to have been called
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