Sandy Grierson and Oliver Ryan will share the roles of Faustus and Mephistopheles in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
Grierson played Ariel in The Tempest, Captain in Twelfth Night and Solinus in The Comedy of Errors, all for the RSC in 2012. Ryan played Jaques in As You Like It and Rosencrantz in Hamlet for the RSC in 2013. They will alternate the parts of embittered academic Faustus and the demon Mephistopheles at each performance of Doctor Faustus.
They are joined by Will Bliss (Valdes / good angel), Jade Croot (Helen of Troy), John Cummins (Cornelius / evil angel), Ruth Everett (scholar / friar / deadly sin), Gabriel Fleary (Emperor / gluttony / scholar), Theo Fraser Steele (Duke / friar / deadly sin), Gemma Goggin (Cardinal of Lorraine), Natey Jones (Frederick / scholar), Richard Leeming (envy / scholar), Nicholas Lumley (Wagner / old man), Tom McCall (Benvolio / friar), Joshua McCord (Martino), Bathsheba Piepe (sloth / scholar / friar), Rosa Robson (scholar), Amy Rockson (Duchess / scholar), Timothy Speyer (Pope) and Eleanor Wyld (Lucifer / scholar).
The play revolves around Faustus, a brilliant but embittered academic who has exhausted the confines of human knowledge. Frustrated with the futility of religion, law and science, he is desperate for a deeper understanding of the universe—and for the worldwide fame that it will bring.
Risking everything, he conjures the demon Mephistopheles and asks him to strike a deal with Lucifer: 24 years of absolute knowledge and infinite power in exchange for his soul.
Faustus agrees to the deal. But as he begins to revel in his new powers, the world around him starts to collapse and the clock inexorably counts down to the final moment of reckoning.
Maria Aberg, who directed John Webster’s The White Devil in 2014 and As You Like It in 2013, returns to the RSC to direct this tale of vanity, greed and damnation.
Doctor Faustus is designed by Naomi Dawson with lighting by Lee Curran. The music is composed by Orlando Gough with sound by Tom Gibbons. Movement is by Ayse Tashkiran. The fight director is Kate Waters and video is by Nathan Parker.
Doctor Faustus runs in the Swan Theatre from Thursday 4 February until Thursday 4 August. Press night will be Thursday 11 February.