I saw this production in embyronic form in Cambridge, and I enjoyed it immensely. The venue was the wonderful St.Peter’s Church at Kettle’s Yard, on a bitterly cold January night, which generated a great atmosphere for Benjamin Blyth’s claustrophobic and restless Faustus. Now, however, it is clear just how vital the dial-an-atmosphere venue was to the production.

This production’s calling card was its use of physical theatre. The procession of the Seven Deadly Sins was excellent. Completely appropriate in how it capitalized on these influences, it was by turns creepy, funny, and extremely stylish. However, the professed physical theatre influences were an empty promise. With this section being so effective, the cast and director were all too eager to let their hobby-horse gallop off to the bank. In the psychomachia scene (good angel, bad angel), Mephistopheles (Toby Parker-Rees) manipulates the two angels like puppets. It’s appropriate for the evil angel, but how, exactly, did this production have Mephistopheles summon a good angel rather than just a bad one? There was insufficient difference between the two angels to convey that the good angel was actually good. Instead, the good angel spoke with a typically ‘evil’ whine and gollum-lite cadence, thereby ignoring the small textual consideration of the fine art of making sense.

Blyth as Faustus and Parker-Rees as Mephistopheles were good at sustaining intensity in the original run, and here they rather creepily circled one another in debate. They alternated between loud argumentation and whispers, which worked in the small Cambridge church, but here was merely an issue with projection. There was good chemistry between Blythe and Parker-Rees, feeding off one another well. Furthermore, the supporting cast of the chorus were all excellent: they just lacked direction and a sense of duty to the text. Yet, Blyth somewhat fluffed the final monologue and, consequently, we got only a weak sense of Faustus’s capriciousness, presumably due to the focus on the supporting characters. Thus, when Faustus skips from placing faith in Jesus and then Lucifer in a matter of seconds at the end of the play, it seems arbitrary rather than terrifying. The ending was something of an anti-climax.

The fundamental flaw of this production was that it was style over substance. The scant one hour they had to perform Marlowe’s play was slightly too heavy on set pieces, without enough attention to the script to counterbalance these interesting moments. Though the Seven Deadly Sins section was superb, what could have been a great set piece was reduced to a good gimmick by the production’s reliance upon this style-angle. Reliance upon such gimmicks is presumably easy to grow out of, with university being the right place to experience theatrical growing pains, and so my final note would be that this company are clearly very talented, and I do look forward to seeing what they do next.  2 stars is a slight underestimate of this production’s worth: but I feel that the mistakes it makes need chastising.