Doctor Faustus
Page 1
DOCTOR FAUSTUS
Christopher Marlowe
and Colin Teevan
DOCTOR FAUSTUS
OBERON BOOKS
LONDON
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First published in 2013 by Oberon Books Ltd
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Scenes 7 to 17 copyright © Colin Teevan, 2013
Reprinted with revisions in 2016
Colin Teevan is hereby identified as author of this version in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.
All rights whatsoever in this version are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to Curtis Brown Group Limited, Haymarket House, 28-29 Haymarket, London, SW14 4SP (cb@curtisbrown.co.uk). No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the author’s prior written consent.
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PB ISBN: 978-1-84943-413-3
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84943-798-1
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Contents
Characters
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Scene 5
Scene 6
Scene 7
Scene 8
Scene 9
Scene 10
Scene 11
Scene 12
Scene 13
Scene 14
Scene 15
Scene 16
Scene 17
Scene 18
Scene 19
Scene 20
The first performance of this version was Saturday 23 February 2013 in the Quarry Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse with the following cast (in alphabetical order):
WAGNER
Leah Brotherhead
DUCHESS, ROBYN
Esther Ruth Elliott
DEVIL, SCHOLAR, PARTY ATTENDEE
Alasdair Hankinson
CORNELIUS
Christopher Keegan
VALDES
John Kielty
LUCIFER, POPE, BRUNO, PRESIDENT
Gary Lilburn
MEPHISTOPHELES
Siobhan Redmond
GOOD ANGEL
Ann Louise Ross
DOCTOR FAUSTUS
Kevin Trainor
BAD ANGEL
Oliver Wilson
All other parts to be played by members of the company
Director
Dominic Hill
Designer
Colin Richmond
Lighting Designer
Tim Mitchell
Composer and Sound Designer
Dan Jones
Illusion Designers
James Freedman and Ben Hart
Movement Director
Kally Lloyd-Jones
Casting Director
Camilla Evans
Dr Faustus was revived by The Jamie Lloyd Company at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, from 9th April 2016 The cast was as follows:
FAUSTUS
Kit Harington
WAGNER
Jade Anouka
VALDES
Danielle Flett
CORNELIUS
Brian Gilligan
MEPHISTOPHELES
Jenna Russell
GOOD ANGEL
Tom Edden
EVIL ANGEL
Craig Stein
LUCIFER
Forbes Masson
ENSEMBLE
Gabby Wong
ENSEMBLE
Garmon Rhys
All other parts played by members of the company
Director
Jamie Lloyd
Designer
Soutra Gilmour
Lighting Designer
Jon Clark
Composition and Sound Design
Ben and Max Ringham
Movement
Polly Bennett
Fight Director
Kate Waters
Illusionist
Scott Penrose
Voice and Text Coach
Barbara Houseman
Dialect Coach
Hugh O’Shea
Associate Director
Jessica Edwards
FOR THE JAMIE LLOYD COMPANY
Artistic Director
Jamie Lloyd
Executive Producer
Adam Speers
Associate Producer
Emily Vaughan-Barratt
General Management
Zareen Walker
Production Assistant
Sarah Cant
Casting
Stuart Burt CDG
THE JAMIE LLOYD COMPANY
The Jamie Lloyd Company is a partnership between acclaimed director Jamie Lloyd and Ambassador Theatre Group. Previous productions include: The Maids starring Uzo Aduba, Zawe Ashton and Laura Carmichael; the fiftieth anniversary production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming; Richard III starring Martin Freeman and Gina McKee; East Is East featuring Jane Horrocks and Ayub Khan Din (recently on a UK tour with Pauline McLynn); The Ruling Class and Macbeth both starring James McAvoy; The Hothouse with John Simm and Simon Russell Beale; and The Pride starring Hayley Atwell.
AMBASSADOR THEATRE GROUP LTD
Co-founded by Sir Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire OBE in 1992, the Ambassador Theatre Group Ltd (ATG) is the world’s number one live-theatre company with 46 venues in Britain, the US and Australia. ATG is also one of the most prolific and internationally recognised award-winning theatre producers in the world with co-productions in the UK, New York, across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. ATG is the market leader in theatre ticketing services through ATG Tickets, LOVETheatre and Group Line.
ATG’s impressive portfolio of West End theatres includes historic buildings such as the Apollo Victoria, Donmar Warehouse, Duke of York’s, Fortune, Harold Pinter, Lyceum, Phoenix, Piccadilly, Playhouse, Savoy and Trafalgar Studios 1 and 2. Around the UK, ATG has regional theatres in Aylesbury, Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Edinburgh, Folkestone, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Oxford, Richmond, Southport, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Torquay, Wimbledon, Woking and York.
In New York, ATG owns The Lyric Theatre, the largest theatre on Broadway and in December 2015, ATG entered a long-term lease for The Hudson Theatre, its second theatre on Broadway, from a subsidiary of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels plc (M&C). M&C and ATG will be, in a multi-million dollar project, restoring the landmark venue to its former glory as a Broadway playhouse.
In 2015, ATG acquired ACE Theatrical Group (ACE), a company which specialises in the operation, design, development and construction of world class, live performance venues throughout North Am
erica comprising The Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, The Saenger Theatre in New Orleans, Louisiana, The Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts in New Orleans, Louisiana, The Majestic Theatre in San Antonio, Texas and The Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in San Antonio, Texas. ATG also became leaseholder and took over the management of the Theatre Royal, Sydney’s oldest theatrical institution, one of the city’s premier venues and ATG’s first theatre in the Asia Pacific region.
ATG has a number of major production company initiatives/partnerships including The Jamie Lloyd Company, Jerry Mitchell Productions and Theatre Royal Brighton Productions. ATG also owns a major national family entertainment and pantomime company, First Family Entertainment (FFE) and is the majority shareholder of BB Group, one of the leading producers and promoters of premium live entertainment in Europe.
Recent ATG co-productions include The End of Longing starring Matthew Perry, The Maids starring Uzo Aduba, Zawe Ashton and Laura Carmichael, The Homecoming, The Ruling Class starring James McAvoy, Oresteia, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown starring Tamsin Greig, East is East starring Jane Horrocks, Richard III starring Martin Freeman, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels starring Robert Lindsay, Jersey Boys, Priscilla Queen of the Desert starring Jason Donovan/Duncan James, Inala, Love Me Tender, Macbeth starring James McAvoy, The Hothouse starring Simon Russell Beale and John Simm, Passion Play starring Zoë Wanamaker, Posh, Jumpy and Constellations (Royal Court at the Duke of York’s), Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 The Musical, Legally Blonde the Musical, Monty Python’s Spamalot, The Rocky Horror Show, Goodnight Mister Tom, The Mystery of Charles Dickens starring Simon Callow, South Pacific starring Samantha Womack and Paulo Szot, All New People starring Zach Braff, Ghost the Musical, Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!, Being Shakespeare starring Simon Callow, The Misanthrope starring Damian Lewis and Keira Knightley, West Side Story, Elling starring John Simm and Guys and Dolls starring Ewan McGregor.
ATG is also mounting productions around the world. ATG’s productions in Australia include Ghost the Musical, Legally Blonde the Musical, Thriller Live, The Rocky Horror Show, Guys and Dolls and West Side Story. Recent ATG productions on Broadway include The Mountaintop starring Samuel L Jackson and Angela Bassett, Exit the King starring Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon and John Doyle’s award winning production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. ATG also co-produced Constellations on Broadway and is currently co-producing multi Tony award winning The King and I with Lincoln Center Theatre.
“GLUTTED WITH CONCEIT”:
MARLOWE’S MARRED MASTERPIECE
Christopher Marlowe, like Shakespeare who was born in the same year, is a good example of sixteenth century social mobility; a playwright of humble origins, like Faustus ‘his parents base of stock’, who rose to move in circles of the rich and powerful, becoming one of the most popular dramatists of his time. Despite his celebrity, however, Marlowe was ever the outsider; possibly spying on the circles he infiltrated, constantly at odds with the law, variously accused of homosexuality, blasphemy and atheism. His short and violent life famously ended in murder (or possibly assassination) in a house in Deptford in 1593. His death was probably connected to his other career as an intelligence gatherer.
Nothing about Marlowe is certain. Many of the more colourful details of his life come from men with agendas: rivals, propagandists, victims of torture. His play, Doctor Faustus is no different; it is not known exactly when it was written and the play-text is just as unstable as any of the testimonies from its author’s life. Indeed, no one can be sure what version of the play the first audiences saw or how this might have differed from later productions and printed editions.
Plays in the sixteenth century were the movies of their time. Going to the theatre was a popular and affordable pastime, but while drama may have enjoyed large audiences, it was not viewed as a serious art form and plays were not widely available in print. The first edition of The Tragicall Historie of D Faustus was not published until 1604, eleven years after Marlowe’s death. The 1604 edition is often referred to as the A-text. The second main version, The tragicall history of the life and death of Doctor Faustus, published in 1616, is known as the B-text and is much longer. It has more comic scenes and more ‘special effects’, leading scholars to suggest that the B-text was performed in London playhouses, while the A-text may have been used for touring to venues that couldn’t accommodate the more elaborate stage directions of the 1616 text. There were seven other editions of the play published between 1604 and 1631 all with minor variations on either the A or B-text.
Textual integrity is further compromised by the fact that Elizabethan plays were vetted. It has been suggested that some of Doctor Faustus’ structural defects are the result of such censorship. These ‘defects’ have aroused a great deal of debate. The central comic scenes of the 1616 text in particular have been criticised as marring a great play and are viewed by some critics as later insertions not written by Marlowe. It is possible they are the ‘adicyones in doctor fostes’ that the theatrical manager Philip Henslowe paid William Birde and Samuel Rowley for in 1602. They got £4 for their work. The lengthy scenes involving Pope Adrian and his rival, Bruno, were clearly designed to appease the English public’s hostility towards Roman Catholicism. The Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth I, proclaiming in 1580 that it would not be a mortal sin to assassinate her. England was also at war with Catholic nations abroad, most notably Spain. Setting a greedy pope and his cardinals up for some slapstick retribution in the form of food gags must have gone down well at the Rose playhouse in London. While these comic episodes may express the ‘carnivalesque’, they do little to further the action of the play or develop the characters.
Doctor Faustus is a play that raises many questions, not only regarding the views of its author (possible government spy and atheist) but also in terms of its themes, genre and characterisation. Is it a morality tale, warning against the seductive powers of pride and avarice or do we end up sympathising with Faustus as a tragic hero who, like Marlowe himself, is a Renaissance everyman punished for stretching knowledge to its limits?
According to the scholar Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Marlowe writes in the period in which European man embarked on his extraordinary career of consumption, his eager pursuit of knowledge, with one intellectual model after another seized, squeezed dry, and discarded, and his frenzied exhaustion of the world’s resources.’1 Images of greed recur throughout the play; Faustus by his own admission is ‘glutted with conceit’. Colin Teevan’s contemporary scenes show us just how relevant Faustus’ desires and dilemmas still are in our own age of globalisation, mass consumption and celebrity adulation.
Madeline Dewhurst, The Open University
1 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), p.199.
Characters
DR FAUSTUS
MEPHISTOPHELES
WAGNER
LUCIFER
GOOD ANGEL
EVIL ANGEL
CORNELIUS
VALDES
DEVIL’S SERVANT
SEVEN DEADLY SINS
SAXON BRUNO
ROBYN
POPE
PRESIDENT
DUCHESS
BANKER, MEDIA MOGUL and MINISTER
MARILYN MONROE
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
SECRET SERVICE MAN and SWAT TEAM
DUKE
FIRST, SECOND and THIRD SCHOLARS
SCENE 1
LUCIFER
Only this, gentles: we must perform
The form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad.
Nothing so sweet as magic is to him,
Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss,
And this the man that in his study sits.
SCENE 2
FAUSTUS
Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin
To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess.
Having commenced, be a divine in show,
And live and die in Aristotle’s works;
Sweet Analytics, ’tis thou hast ravished me!
(He reads.)
‘Bene disserere est finis logices.’
Is to dispute well logic’s chiefest end?
Affords this art no greater miracle?
Then read no more. Thou hast attained the end.
A greater subject fitteth Faustus’ wit.
Bid On kai me on farewell. Galen, come!
Be a physician, Faustus. Heap up gold,
And be eternised for some wondrous cure.
(He reads.)
‘Summum bonum medicinae sanitas.’
The end of physic is our body’s health.
Why Faustus, hast thou not attained that end?
Is not thy common talk sound aphorisms?
Are not thy bills hung up as monuments,
Whereby whole cities have escaped the plague
And thousand desp’rate maladies been eased?
Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.
Wouldst thou make man to live eternally?
Or, being dead, raise them to life again?
Then this profession were to be esteemed.
Physic, farewell!
When all is done, divinity is best.
Jerome’s Bible, Faustus, view it well.
(He reads.)
‘Stipendium peccati mors est.’ Ha!
The reward of sin is death. That’s hard.
(He reads.)
‘If we say that we have no sin,
We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us.’
Why then belike we must sin,