Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Michael Cavanagh, Will Burn, Maria Hutchison, Faye Caddick, Stephen Kinsella, Ian Gray, Elaine Stewart, Yahya Baggash, Peter Durr, Alan Bower.
The price of having it all, of truly understanding everything, is far too high, especially if you have to make a pact with the Devil to achieve it.
Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus is a play of such renown, such intricate detail, that it can be seen as perhaps being too lofty an ideal to attain on the stage. It requires not only the journey for the actor to truly get to grips with the language set out by arguably the only man who could equal William Shakespeare in terms of understanding the human condition at the time and putting them into words, but also for the use of Latin in the text; something that wouldn’t have been particularly a strange tongue to hear in 16th Century England, especially amongst the ruling classes, but in today’s more aesthetic world is considered a luxury of learning.
For the cast of the latest work to be presented by Burjesta Theatre at the Casa on Hope Street, Dr. Faustus represents a huge high in a field that is strewn with great adaptations by Mikyla Jane Durkin and Julian Bond. To get to grips with the text is one thing, it is a challenging piece of work that can trip up even the seasoned professional after all, to convey the point of the play, to capture not only the essence of the man who spurned God and turned to Lucifer but also that of the mystery of Marlowe himself takes guts and fortitude to attain in full.
Much praise must be delivered upon the shoulders of Will Burn as Dr. Faustus who gave such a peerless performance that the Faustian Pact could well have been designed with him in mind, strong, confident and with an air of supreme guidance that it was impossible to turn away whilst he was on stage.
Burjesta Theatre bring these plays to stage for the sheer delight and pleasure, each one framing the spirit of the company and the ethos behind them with such prowess that at times its hard to believe that these are people to whom that the world of the non-professional is as gratifying as those as the specialist. For Burjesta Theatre, Dr. Faustus is a play that really has been allowed to get under their skin, to really come out with guns blazing and to have the ideal delivered with as much intensity as is possible.
A cracking performance by all in a play that demands much!
Ian D. Hall