Regular NHTJ readers recognize that I am something of a Faustus freak. BBC Radio 4 is rerunning the network’s uproarious 2008 tongue-in-cheek revision of various Faust dramas, adapted by Martin Jenkin and celebrated fringe-circuit playwright and Red Shift Theatre founder Jonathan Holloway.
The five part series gives rather more attention to Mephistopheles (Mark Gatiss) than it does to Doctor Faustus (Julian Rhind-Tutt)—and realizes how much comedy you can pack into the story of a man selling his soul to the devil. One running (or rather sitting) gag is that the devil can’t sit in chairs with backs because of his wings and tail. There’s lots of gross-out humor as well; when Faustus asks about the ink with which he is signing his soul away, he’s told not to ask but persists. “One word,” says Mephistopheles. “Hemorrhoids.”
Faustus has been mined for comedy many times before, most notably by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Bedazzled but also by untold vaudevilleans and puppeteers who reworked the tragedy into a moralistic laugh riot.
Broadcast in five short bits that add up to little more than an hour, Jenkin & Holloway’s Faust is fast and loose, the satanic sitcom that’s bursting beneath every rendition back to Christopher Marlowe’s.
Listen here.