Radio review: Doctor Faustus

The last time the RSC tackled Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the concept of the damned scholar and his demon servant as a two sides of the same coin was played with by having two actors alternate the roles of Faustus and Mephistopheles, with both actors and audience only finding out who would play whom at the start of the performance. Radio is a medium that allows for the idea to be taken easily to the next conclusion, so adaptor/director Emma Harding gives us hot Heff-on-Heff action: John Heffernan plays both roles in this recent Radio 3 broadcast. Faustus is a Wittenberg scholar frustrated by the limits of human knowledge found in the approved books; he expands his horizons to forbidden tomes on demonology, and manages to summon Mephistopheles. Despite the demon himself warning him against it, Faustus signs a contract to sell his soul to Lucifer in exchange for 24 years of Mephistopheles giving him any knowledge and power he desires.

Faustus' servant Wagner (Pearl Mackie) becomes more of a narrator in this heavily edited version, that uses the double casting to look less at the theological questions in the play, more at the idea that this is all in the damned man's head. Giving Faustus an energetic, impatient tone, Heffernan has a softer, sadder voice for Mephistopheles, the demon constantly tortured by the simple fact of having experienced perfect happiness in heaven, and knowing he'll never be able to return to it (it struck me listening to this how many times he reiterates the fact, suggesting that with the amount of times he asks for a more tangible description of hell Faustus never really grasps it.)

As well as a different delivery, there's an echoing effect on Mephistopheles' dialogue to differentiate it, and what's interesting is that when various other devils and deadly sins are anthropomorphised in the play, the echo under their voices is also supplied by Heffernan, building on the suggestion of the whole thing being an invention of Faustus' imagination. In recent months Harding's has been a name I've been pleased to see attached to a radio play, as much more than other adaptations I've listened to she seems able to bring a real sense of a high-concept production through audio only, largely through not being afraid to tinker with the text. So the play's most famous speech "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships?" is delivered to a prostitute whom Faustus, hallucinating on the run after committing a murder, has mistaken for Helen of Troy.

In her introduction Harding says the concept of Faustus-as-Mephistopheles partly came from the fact that, when his 24 years are up, Faustus is still in a dusty university room filled with books despite having spent a quarter of a century with supposedly infinite power. But another thing the production highlights by doing this is that infinite power is made finite by a person's imagination: All Faustus knows is books, so although his ambitions get grander eventually, all he can think to ask for initially is more books, containing the answers his current collection is lacking. And it's not just him, as in what remains of the comic subplot when Robin and Ralph (Joseph Ayre and Leo Wan) steal a magic book, their plans for it don't extend much further than their next meal. Even the Emperor (Tim McMullan) asks for miracles from Faustus in language that suggests he wants a cheap side-show.

Doctor Faustus isn't a play full of light relief and there's even less here, especially as we lose the opportunity for spectacle. But the 90-minute edit is one I think would work well on stage, and even just in audio Harding finds interesting ways to play around with what Marlowe might be trying to say.

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe is available on BBC Sounds.

Image credit: BBC.