Customer Reviews

Faustus

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I was a little apprehensive at first to push through the first few pages or so. I knew Mamet was a screenplay writer so when I saw the language this was written in I thought it was some lame attempt at 17th century English with no real literary merit. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the characters and plot. The character of Faustus provided insight on our busy world. With his son's sickness at hand, Faustus shews away his hysterical wife in order to continue working on his math theories. He is more caught up in hearing what the scientific community has to say about him, then his family falling apart. Finally his self-serving ways steer him into his inevitable downfall. Very well written. Push through the language and know that it is not an arrogant attempt at something, but Mamet's way of shaping the atmosphere and setting.

I read Faustus with high anticipation, but it disappointed -or rather, perplexed--me. My judgment is highly subjective -don't trust it alone--but in the first act, where, naturally, the playwright must catch the attention and support of the audience, I felt Mamet's prose didn't work. It was too elliptical. More `direct' would have worked better. The dialogue was too murky. It seemed to fight the plot, which is a condensation and radical reworking of the Faust story. In the second act, Faust's abandoned wife and son come back from the grave to accuse him: that act flowed better and it seemed to make more sense. All in all, I wouldn't inflict this play on an audience.

This was downright disappointing. Faust usually leaves me cold, but at least Goethe's play, despite the tedious length and language, had some meat to it. By stripping it down, Mamet destroys both flesh and bones. The pretentious language telegraphs a con game that has no substance except guilt for ambition, ego, and neglect of wife and child. An actor of tremendous charm might make us care about these things, but since we seldom see the wife and never see the child, we mainly know about them from our imagination. They seem just one more trick of the protagonist's narcissistic mind. One imagines some magic in the theater that temporarily distracts the audience, but on the page the illusions are wispy indeed. The snap and crackle of Mamet's contemporary plays lose all pop in this timeless, placeless epic. It's too much of nothing.