Wales Actors Company
Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon The Big Issue…. March 8 04

At odds with their annual tour of Shakespeare under the warm summer skies, this dark season finds the Wales Actors Company focusing their attentions on the infernal arts in a play by Christopher Marlowe, a notorious contemporary of the Bard. Doctor Faustus, played with intensity by leading actor Korah Knight, is a scholar thirsty for knowledge at any cost, even to the extent of selling his soul to the devil.

Retold by Goethe, and later as an opera by Belioz, director Paul Garnault has turned to Murnau's 1920s silent film Faust as inspiration for his prelude. Eerie, flickering clips play on a video screen at the rear of the stage, spliced with contemporary footage of tonight's players and heightened dramatically by the accompanying strains of Mahler's 2nd Symphony. Throughout the evening, the video screen will serve as a vital part of the action, relaying obtusely angled CCTV images of the performance bringing to mind suggestions of Big Brother, or the Even Bigger Brother -- God.

A drama of its age, Doctor Faustus conjures with the spiritual and moral concerns of the Renaissance as scholars and occultists delved deeper into the workings of the universe, both inside and outside the human mind. In searching for contemporary resonance, Garnault has trimmed and adapted the play
employing a Good, and a Bad Angel, played respectively by Cristina Catalina and Griff Jameson, to fight for Faustus' soul (or his latter day conscience). Catalina's clipped, puritanical delivery contrasts well with Jameson's loose, comfortable irreverence. Sporting long, unkempt hair, a bare chest, and convincingly played by Phillip John, Satan's servant and messenger Mephistopheles is terrifyingly unhinged and manipulative, easily suggesting the imagery of William Blake. The whole production carries an aura of intense claustrophobia as we remain in Faustus' book strewn study under sparse pale lighting for the entire performance. At several points the two Angels direct hand held flash lights at Faustus to illuminate his mass as well as the workings of his mind.

The use of CCTV and new media is the key brilliance to this modern production. The hells of the mind have been wrestled with for millennia but the salutary tale of Doctor Faustus is relevant to today's increasingly Godless society because we may never have been so alone in our own universes as we find
ourselves today.

Jane Oriel

“intense brilliance” Big Issue