Faustus!

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin

Dr John Faustus wants it all. Having mastered the worlds of logic, law, medicine and theology, the hero of Christopher Marlowe’s play finally makes a pact with the devil and sells his soul for unlimited knowledge and experience.

Roger Gregg’s clattering, truncated adaptation of Marlowe’s play for Crazy Dog Audio Theatre has a similar hunger in its search for possibilities in music and movement, but it really makes you wonder what a soul is worth these days. Staged as a short musical, performed largely by a young cast of player/performers who double as demons in scanty attire (it’s hot in hell, I suppose), Gregg’s production is no frills, but contains lots of lace, leather and bodices.

“I am wanton and lascivious,” Bryan Burroughs’s Faustus explains when he asks Mephistopheles (Margaret McAuliffe) for a wife. Those words come straight from Marlowe, but here they underline a series of tediously narrow temptations. In the original, there’s a moral minefield before Faustus makes his deal (even Mephistopheles tries to dissuade him), and his powers are waged against the pope, the German emperor and Alexander the Great. Here he is little more than a delighted spectator at a fetish-gear fashion show.

Occasionally there are glimpses of something more textured. The default musical mode is either carnival carousel or slinky cabaret with ample room for gong abuse. But when Faustus wants to know the secrets of astronomy, Gregg – writer, director, composer, musical director and performer – reaches for a more supple music of the spheres while performers orbit around Burroughs (who is also movement director) as though floating in space.

It’s appropriate too that Charlie Murphy’s Good Angel has a heavenly singing voice, understandable that she doubles as Helen of Troy, but ill-considered that she supplies demonic chants through a vocoder, as though character is subordinated to sound effect. Similarly confusing are the Seven Deadly Sins, who, despite individual introductions, are almost indistinguishable in their wriggling, shrieking and tongue-flicking.

The devil is in the detail, but when the director is also playing a shirtless, sax-playing Lucifer, the devil seems over-extended and inattentive to the stage. “To conclude,” the show finishes bluntly, “this is hell.” Those words may not be musical, but they’re hard to contradict.

Runs until Nov 26