Left cold by a lacklustre pact with the Devil

Doctor Faustus, Royal Exchange, Manchester

IT could have been powerful and extraordinary but, just as for the last play of the summer season, this first outing of the Exchange’s autumn run leaves me cold.

Marlowe’s version of the great German legend has a glorious reputation, both for being a step-change in English playwriting and for its subject matter, the bored doctor’s pact with Lucifer.

But this pact with the Devil is about as thrilling a transaction as going to the shops for a bottle of milk.

Granted, some of the special effects are good. There is a billowy, devilish head that must be eight feet high, swathed in black drapes; when Lucifer conjures up the seven deadly sins, they come courtesy of man-sized, grotesque heads depicting the sins in question, and there are a few clever magic tricks — particularly one in which Faustus’s head is brutally cut from his neck.

Director Toby Frew also does the pre-interval climax well too, as Faustus’s demons attack a crowd of knights keen on running Faustus through.

Always send the crowd out for a drink with blood washing round the stage, and here the crowd scene is particularly effective because it is actually a crowd, with around 30 actors and acting students to make up the demonic numbers.

But — and it’s a big but — all this cleverness of setting, ghostly voices offstage and the rest is singularly wasted on the production as a whole.

Frew gets the balance of comedy and tragedy a bit askew; the comedy not really very funny and the serious bits not nearly scary enough.

But the biggest problem is with the main characters. Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie) is played as white-faced, silver-dressed high-wire act with more girlish laughter than bowels-of-hell horror; his (her?) servant Mephistopheles is a kindly-looking, white-bearded Ian Redford — rather too avuncular in a dog-collar.

And having Patrick O’Kane as Faustus must have seemed like a great idea, since he comes across as a mix of Patrick Stewart nobility (and baldness) and Ben Kingsley mean-spiritedness. And also, sadly, of Derek Jacobi campness.

Normally a strong and intense actor, O’Kane, looks great; tall and imposing. But every time he opens his mouth to act he goes into overdrive, coming off as too camp in the first hour and while improving as the evening gets more serious, in overdrive in his big final soliloquy, overacting for all he’s worth.