Word: faustus
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Frightful Morality. The grotesque group therapy of the pornographer prompts the author to quote a passage from Mann's Doctor Faustus: "We only release, only set free. We let the lameness and self-consciousness, the chaste scruples and doubts go to the Devil." For Devil, Bloomfield adds thoughtfully, "read, if you like, 'Mr. Samson.' " Yet who is Samson? The bookseller shrouds himself in dialectic and mockery. He rails against society, and conjectures with an unreadable expression that in the "groans of disgust or cynical obscenities" uttered by buyers of his pornography, "one can hear...
...play is entitled Tomorrow Morning, Faustus. It was written by I. A. Richards, noted literary critic...
...only real story, of Faust and the young Gretchen, whose seduction leads to madness and death. The Faustian quest makes for a whole kaleidoscope of moods, a whole panorama of settings. To the English-speaking world, Faust is best known, outside opera, in Marlowe's fitfully magnificent Dr. Faustus. But as Georg Brandes once noted, where Marlowe's Faust, loving power, craves omnipotence on earth, Goethe's, loving wisdom, seeks omniscience. Power inspires sharper drama than knowledge, particularly for those without the German to follow Faust's speculations and soliloquizings. Goethe's Mephistopheles...
Denni Allen makes a delightful Mephistopheles, somewhat coy and aloof, domineering, and beautifully expansive in his moment, ever tempting Faustus to greater sin. He suffers, however, from a fault which seemed to impede nearly everyone in the cast: an inability to lend sufficient grandeur to his speech. However regal his actions, his voice almost always gives him away...
...play relies heavily on making damnation as much a reality to the twentieth century audience as it was (without exaggerated staging) to that of the sixteenth. In this Baker was successful and he came closer to achieving a sense of the spectacular in the knowledge and wonders displayed by Faustus and Mephistopheles...