DR FAUSTUS Selling your soul to the devil
The choice of this year’s senior production, Dr Faustus, posed some interesting challenges for Director Ms Robyn Peers.
Firstly, the production had to have a largely male cast and, secondly, it was following last year’s highly successful sell-out production of CATS, performed with Rangi Ruru. “A musical has a standard pattern with set music which you follow,’’ says Ms Peers. “However, with a play, you just have the words and you have to create everything around them. There are also two separate scripts for the play, so I had to choose pieces from both and change some of the wording for a student audience. “It was a matter of getting a solid storyline of Dr Faustus selling his soul to the devil, abusing his powers and eventually going to hell, with the spectacle contained within the script. So we had giant
puppets, ultraviolet-lit planets, stilt walkers and lots of comedy. An important layer was music, Ms Peers says. “Nic Sutcliffe and David Chambers were discussing music at the Year 10 dance and realised that DJ music would be great in the production. So the music was pretty amazing with its mixture of club, classical and contemporary.’’ There was not much fat in the budget this year, so all the costumes and sets were from recycled materials. “We went through every costume and piece of material that we had and designer Mandy Dickie recreated the most marvellous costumes,’’ she says. “We had a colour palette of grey and black with touches of red and purple, so it was quite spectacular.
Dr Faustus photos by Ian Kelly, Grant Bennett and Louise Webster.
Christ’s College Canterbury
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