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lethargic_manThree and a half weeks ago (which just shows how far behind on my blogging I am), I took ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aviva_m to see Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus at the Globe (the reconstruction of the theatre Shakespeare presented his plays at).
I'd seen a play at the Globe once before, paying through the nose for a seat, but a work colleague said I really had to experience being a groundling (i.e. standing up, in the yard before the stage). He talked about how, when he went to see Macbeth, the groundlings were given plastic capes to keep the blood off their clothes.
aviva_m wasn't happy at the idea of standing up for three hours (admittedly with an interval in the middle), but I talked her into it in the end, and it turned out not to be so bad. By the time we turned up, the best positions (where one could rest one's elbows on the stage, and freak the actors out by looking into eyes at point blank range) were already gone, but for the second half I was close enough to the ramp up onto the stage that as actors passed up it their cloaks brushed against my legs.
I was horrified to learn, when I first read the play (just over a year ago) that Goethe changed the ending of the story in his plays of it. The whole point about Faust (as it comes across to me) is that you have to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If Faust bargains his soul away for twenty-four years of hedonism, there's a terrible inevitability that he gets dragged down to Hell at the end. The whole Christian thing of saved by God's grace seems profoundly wrong to me.
I also have a sense that when a story has come down to you, it's poor artistic integrity to change the ending. (OTOH, Shakespeare got away with that to good effect in King Lear... though I'm not sure I'd have reacted that way there had I known the original story first.) Anyhow, I was shocked to discover, when I got Little Shop of Horrors out on DVD a couple of years ago (largely because I'd been going "Feed me, Seymour!" for years, and wanted to check memory had not made it inaccurate), precisely that happened there. It seems (SPOILERS FOLLOW for the rest of this paragraph) that in the stage play the film was based on (which itself was based on an earlier film version), Seymour and Audrey get killed, and Audrey II and its offspring take over the world; but at preview showings audiences did not react at all well to that, and so the film makers bowed to public opinion and changed the film to give it a happy ending, taking the sting out of Seymour's Faustian bargain (and throwing away a high-budget special effects ending, which you can now see in glorious black-and-white on YouTube). I'm appalled that they would be prepared to mess with their artistic integrity like that, particularly given that the stage play had already been a success with the original ending.
Anyhow, coming back to Doctor Faustus, it amused me to introduce a German to the original ending of a German story, before a German messed with it, by showing her an English play, so I tookaviva_m. (I lent her the script first, as the Elizabethan English is not the easiest thing to follow if it's not your native language.)
Having now proved to myself that standing up for three hours isn't too bad, I now think I ought to be a groundling again, to introduce myself to more Shakespeare, as it's for gornisht (£5 a shot, compared to £15–£37½ for a seat). Unfortunately, with the exception of the seventh of August, for which attending the theatre does not seem consonant with it being in the Nine Days, I'm not free again on a Sunday until the fourth of September (and there's no Sunday performances of Shakespeare thenceforward this year). So the question is: do I motivate myself for a weekday performance, or do I just let it slip until next year? (Anyone want to attend a weekday performance with me?)
aviva_m to see Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus at the Globe (the reconstruction of the theatre Shakespeare presented his plays at).I'd seen a play at the Globe once before, paying through the nose for a seat, but a work colleague said I really had to experience being a groundling (i.e. standing up, in the yard before the stage). He talked about how, when he went to see Macbeth, the groundlings were given plastic capes to keep the blood off their clothes.
aviva_m wasn't happy at the idea of standing up for three hours (admittedly with an interval in the middle), but I talked her into it in the end, and it turned out not to be so bad. By the time we turned up, the best positions (where one could rest one's elbows on the stage, and freak the actors out by looking into eyes at point blank range) were already gone, but for the second half I was close enough to the ramp up onto the stage that as actors passed up it their cloaks brushed against my legs.I was horrified to learn, when I first read the play (just over a year ago) that Goethe changed the ending of the story in his plays of it. The whole point about Faust (as it comes across to me) is that you have to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If Faust bargains his soul away for twenty-four years of hedonism, there's a terrible inevitability that he gets dragged down to Hell at the end. The whole Christian thing of saved by God's grace seems profoundly wrong to me.
I also have a sense that when a story has come down to you, it's poor artistic integrity to change the ending. (OTOH, Shakespeare got away with that to good effect in King Lear... though I'm not sure I'd have reacted that way there had I known the original story first.) Anyhow, I was shocked to discover, when I got Little Shop of Horrors out on DVD a couple of years ago (largely because I'd been going "Feed me, Seymour!" for years, and wanted to check memory had not made it inaccurate), precisely that happened there. It seems (SPOILERS FOLLOW for the rest of this paragraph) that in the stage play the film was based on (which itself was based on an earlier film version), Seymour and Audrey get killed, and Audrey II and its offspring take over the world; but at preview showings audiences did not react at all well to that, and so the film makers bowed to public opinion and changed the film to give it a happy ending, taking the sting out of Seymour's Faustian bargain (and throwing away a high-budget special effects ending, which you can now see in glorious black-and-white on YouTube). I'm appalled that they would be prepared to mess with their artistic integrity like that, particularly given that the stage play had already been a success with the original ending.
Anyhow, coming back to Doctor Faustus, it amused me to introduce a German to the original ending of a German story, before a German messed with it, by showing her an English play, so I took
aviva_m. (I lent her the script first, as the Elizabethan English is not the easiest thing to follow if it's not your native language.)Having now proved to myself that standing up for three hours isn't too bad, I now think I ought to be a groundling again, to introduce myself to more Shakespeare, as it's for gornisht (£5 a shot, compared to £15–£37½ for a seat). Unfortunately, with the exception of the seventh of August, for which attending the theatre does not seem consonant with it being in the Nine Days, I'm not free again on a Sunday until the fourth of September (and there's no Sunday performances of Shakespeare thenceforward this year). So the question is: do I motivate myself for a weekday performance, or do I just let it slip until next year? (Anyone want to attend a weekday performance with me?)
