1986parkbench
'In this production by a Cambridge-based touring group, the text was heavily cut and edited to accommodate a cast of four [...] the doubling and editing only very infrequently effective.
Having Mephistopholis hypnotise Faustus so he acted out all the sins himself was both clever and psychologically suggestive, and letting Faustus and Mephistopholis ironically sing the excommunication nicely dramatised the blasphemy.
Faustus played with all the excess of nineteenth-century melodrama and Mephistopholis was auditioning for Dracula, while the comic scenes were heavy-handed slapstick, down to a pie in the Pope's face.'
Gerald M. Berkowitz, RORD 29 (1986-1987), 60