Sock ’n’ Buskin’s new season will kick off with a demon summoning, and a visit from Satan himself.
The theatre company is putting on a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the story of a man whose quest for knowledge takes a damning turn when he sells his soul to Lucifer. The play will run from Nov. 26-29 in room 2017 of Dunton Tower.
“ ‘Tis magic, magic that has ravished me,” Faustus says early on. Later, he announces: “Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub.”
Director Ian Gillies said it has been “incredibly rewarding” to see Marlowe’s work brought to the stage. He said he fell in love with the play the first time he read it.
“Marlowe is very rarely done anymore and I don’t really understand why. The language in it is beautiful, absolutely beautiful,” he said.
At a Saturday morning rehearsal, actors worked their way through long passages of blank verse and prose, sometimes stumbling, stopping to clarify meaning, calling for a line, or commenting on the action.
“Faustus is an ass,” someone remarked, and everyone agreed.
He’s a relatable scoundrel, though—his is the story of “a man turning away from faith, turning to the taboo, whatever that might be in a contemporary light,” Gillies said.
While it deals with heavy themes such as wasted potential and indecisiveness, it’s also a play filled with “loud music and devils running around,” he added. “That will be a lot of fun.”
Doctor Faustus is the beginning of a Sock ’n’ Buskin season filled with tragedy, black humour, and light comedy.
The next play on the agenda is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which will be performed at the Kailash Mital theatre in late January. Co-artistic director Cassie Nagy said directors Keith Hickey and Jake Pitre are “taking that show and sort of twisting it on its head.” Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials is a popular text for high school students, Nagy added, so she’s excited for a re-imagining of a familiar story.
The Crucible will be followed by a production of Patrick Hamilton’s Rope, the play that inspired the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name. Two university students who murder a classmate out of a sense of intellectual superiority hide his body in a trunk, and then hold a party with that trunk in the room.
According to director Kosta Diochnos, it’s a unique kind of murder mystery because the audience knows who the murderers are but they don’t know whether or not they’ll get caught. Rope will be performed in February.
And then something completely different: Shakespeare’s As You Like It. A story of exile, cross-dressing, and “wacky shenanigans,” the play is a “light romp through the forest,” said director Matthew Venner. As You Like It will be performed in March.
The season will finish with Tom Stoppard’s absurdist comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, directed by Kevin MacDonald.
Nagy said Sock ’n’ Buskin will be exploring unconventional venues and performance spaces such as the Carleton University Art Gallery.
“We want to branch out again like we did last year,” she said. “It really pushed the actors to be a bit more creative and to come up with solutions technically and artistically.”
