Aman (it is almost always a man) strikes a deal for greatness and pays a terrible price for it. The Faust myth teaches us to be careful of what we wish for, that pride comes before a fall, that nothing comes for free. Faustus is bored by the limits of his mortality (and his humanity) and so seeks supernatural aid. Only when the devil comes to claim his due does Faustus realise he has reached too far. He begs forgiveness, but it’s too late – he’s made his bed and now he must lie in it.
The story endures because greed endures, and ambition endures, and we are never short of contemporary figures who believe they can beat the system, or that the rules needn’t apply to them. A modern Faustus might be a tech billionaire, a doctor playing God, or a Boris Johnson-type signing over his soul to a Mephistophelian Dominic Cummings figure – the only part that may feel like a stretch is that, in most versions, Faustus gets his comeuppance.
However, there is one element of the story that I often find unsatisfying. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has moments of genius but thoroughly derails itself in the middle, primarily because Faustus doesn’t really do anything of note with his powers. He is granted near unlimited gifts and he squanders them pulling pranks and playing tricks. I think this is partially because Marlowe’s Faustus never has a real need for the devil. He is already a successful medical doctor whose bills are “hung up as monuments, whereby whole cities have escaped the plague”. He’s on top as it is. Now, the story of a man who has everything and yet still yearns for more is not uninteresting, but I think it misses a trick.
In my new play, my Faustus is a young woman in 17th-century London, the daughter of a plague doctor father and a herbalist mother who was tried and killed as a witch when Faustus was a girl. She’s grown up with a mistrust of organised religion and a fascination with the occult, and exists on the fringes of society. She has no wealth and little agency. By the time she meets Lucifer she knows the risks but sees his offer as the least bad option available to her. As she tells him:
Why then how could this fate be any worse
Than to be bound to any common man?
Oh, if you knew the lives we women lead
You’d understand the Devil is a catch.
Faustus sells her soul in order to control her destiny, and to ensure what happened to her mother cannot happen to her (or any other woman). The deal she strikes is similar, but her road to damnation is driven by a very different set of circumstances. Faustus’s sex (and social class) doesn’t just affect her motivations; it also affects how she’s treated and what she’s able to do with the gifts she’s given. Through this, the play becomes a study of how we treat women who pursue greatness, and how traits that seem admirable in men here might warrant damnation. I wanted to create an epic, ambitious, gothic, baroque fever dream of a piece that took a well-known classic and inverted it to say something truthful about the contemporary female experience.
About five years ago, I decided to stop writing male protagonists for a while. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule (and one I broke when making Pericles for the National Theatre last year, although we did explore what a female Pericles might have looked like), but it’s something I intend to stick with for a little while longer. This wasn’t intended as a huge political gesture, but it’s one tiny thing I can do to try to redress the gender imbalance that exists across our stages.
The western canon is dominated by male leads, and our industry is stuffed with incredible women who shouldn’t be relegated to always playing someone’s wife or mother. Quite aside from that, it makes my work more interesting, especially when reimagining existing stories. Inserting a woman into a traditionally male narrative complicates things. It creates more edges and obstacles. It highlights the way in which women still operate in a world designed by and for men, and how their very presence can send a story we think we know into strange and exciting directions.
That said, the Faust myth endures because it is universal, and I don’t think any of that changes with this new retelling. It’s still the same story of vaulting ambition, hubris and exceptionalism, of what we’re prepared to sacrifice to achieve greatness, of the tantalising thought that, despite all the evidence, we might finally be the one to outsmart the devil. None of this is lost by having a female Faustus, although hopefully it brings into focus the way in which women are still punished for their ambition in a way men often aren’t.
My Faustus is by no means a saint. She’s still just as vainglorious and headstrong and morally compromised as any other version. She just happens to be a woman, and that means her narrative plays out in a different way. We should be filling our stages with women just as messy, complicated and conflicted as any of their male counterpoints, and I hope she lives up to that.
• Headlong’s production Faustus: That Damned Woman is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London, 22 January-22 February. Then touring.
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