Dr. Faustus - 80th anniversary

[Wellesnet]

Welles's Landmark Staging of Marlowe's Faustus Turns 80:
http://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-l ... -turns-80/



"All the characters I've played are Faustian, because we live in a world that was built by Faust. Our modern world is Faustian"
- Orson Welles

[Roger Ryan]

Some wonderful photos found on the Library of Congress site; while none of them capture what Welles' lighting must have been like, you can get a good sense of how the stage was laid out and how the puppets and costumes must have appeared.

Also, it's clear that the "Second Scholar", credited as being played by "Joseph Wooll", is actually performed by Joseph Cotten (using the pseudonym to avoid a theater guild infringement, I believe). This play on Cotten's last name made me laugh when I first read about it last year in Patrick McGilligan's book "Young Orson" - for my high school drama class, I performed a short original scene as an aging film director reading a letter sent to him by an old acting associate; the "director" was, of course, modeled on Welles and I gave the associate the name of "Joseph Wool", not realizing at the time that the name had actually been used by the actor forty-some years earlier!

[Le Chiffre]

That’s a pretty funny coincidence.

One of the big losses pertaining to Welles’s inability to get his CRADLE WILL ROCK film off the ground in the early 80s was the fact that the screenplay called for the recreation of scenes from FAUSTUS, since that show was still running on Broadway while CRADLE was being prepared. Then we probably would have seen some approximation of what Abe Feder’s fabled lighting was like. Tim Robbins had some Faustus in his Cradle Will Rock film, but you don’t get much of a sense of what it was really like, since those scenes were done more in a spirit of parody then authenticity. Callow’s first book offers probably the best description of what the original production was like.

What’s interesting about the Faustus show is that it’s the first time in his New York career that Welles took total control of a production, both onstage and off (I don’t believe he even appeared in either VOODOO MACBETH or HORSE EATS HAT). In FAUSTUS, he is the absolute center of attention, both as actor and director, just as he would later be in CITIZEN KANE, MOBY DICK REHEARSED and the Shakespeare trilogy. In that sense it is arguably one of the most completely “Wellesian” of all his stage works.