Following the current fashion for changing the gender of characters in plays, in this production both Dr Faustus and Mephistophiles are portrayed by women. I did not feel the play gained from this – but nor did it lose, except inevitably a little in the scene with Helen of Troy. However, in a candle-lit theatre the fact that several characters wore dark-coloured robes meant that visibility at times was poor from seats not close to the stage. There was a lot of shrieking and screaming – to the detriment of Marlowe’s poetry, while failing to enhance the drama. More generally, this production lacked lustre, with rather underwhelming terror in the last speech. I have certainly seen better productions.
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)’s production of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was exciting, dramatic, and emotional. The show combined both parts of Marlowe’s seminal play into 200 action-packed minutes.
The staging of the play was minimal but effective. Michael Boyd’s direction used the entire theatre, with supporting players declaiming their lines from the audience. Characters were introduced and their changes in fortune viscerally illustrated with simple costume changes or splashes of blood. We see Tamburlaine decimating king after king, and when Bajazeth (Sagar I M Arya) is wheeled out in an iron cage, you feel the hairs stand on the back of your neck at what could possibly happen next.
Photo by Ellie Kurttz. Copyright RSC
The violent deaths were stylishly graphic, and, combined with the throbbing bass of timpani and orchestral undercurrents, lent to a heightened sense of the macabre.
The eponymous Scythian shepherd played as arrogance personified by Jude Owusu, delivered Marlowe’s beautiful lines with both pomp as well as pain. You fear for Zenocrate (Rosy McEwen) when she pleads for her father’s life, and even hope against hope when, as Callapine, she spurs other kings to rise up against the tyrannical Tamburlaine.
A great supporting cast worked to show how unbridled ambition for power unravels with chilling consequences. Some parts were a little over-acted, but, given the scale of the drama, can be excused since the languid but emotion-logged language towers above everything else – little nuances in quieter scenes and smacking theatregoers in the face during vicissitudinal melodrama.
Jude Owusu as Tamburlaine. Photo copyright of the RSC.
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has produced at Stratford-on-Avon’s Swan Theatre an impressive Tamburlaine. It is gripping and fast-moving, without losing any of the poetry or meaning.
Jude Owusu, who plays Tamburlaine, is a tall black actor who dominates the stage whenever he appears on it, especially when wearing a glittering gold crown. His towering figure well presents both the monstrous and the magnetically-attractive sides of Tamburlaine.
Rosy McEwen is Zenocrate and she and the many others in the cast are all good.
Part One of the plays is performed before the interval, with Part Two after it. Some cuts give a total performance time of three and a half hours (including the interval).
My guess is that the production will not transfer to London as it would need considerable adaptation from the Swan’s layout to the Barbican theatre. So, see it at Stratford-on-Avon if you can!
Review by Valerie Colin-Russ.
Show Info
Dates: From now until 1 December 2018.
Running Time: 3 hours 2 minutes + 20 minute interval Book Tickets
