Speed

Okay I admit it – last week I nearly killed my boss. No, it wasn’t a confrontation; Tim and I get on brilliantly - we are a close team. It was in a car. We were bowling along between Truro and St Austell (me driving). For some reason we were traversing a pretty narrow lane when he pointed out a house owned by a friend of ours, nestling in the distant hills. I braked, and swerved, and no harm was done. Thank God.This is not an isolated incident – Tim was the only person brave enough to be a passenger when I drove for the first time after passing my test. As always, he remained very calm. But what is it about theatre directors and cars? I have had close encounters of the mobile kind with at least two leading lights of the theatre world. To the eminent director who nearly killed me when swerving out of a T-junction without looking, I apologise for my bad language. As for the other who somehow managed to navigate us across a jam packed London high street without so much as a bump or a scratch, I thank you for putting my safety before your own, but not for the rise in both our blood pressures. And as for the (nameless) one who proceeded through the West End at a highly illegal speed on that long distant Sunday afternoon...well, enough said.Would Marlowe have been great in a car? I can only imagine that the prospect of Kit behind the wheel would have been more hair-raising than the above incidents put together. To people living in the 1500s, transport must have had a whole different edge to it. Walking thirty of forty miles was nothing, and horses were a luxury. Then of course he also wrote a whole play about transport – DOCTOR FAUSTUS.Not only does FAUSTUS contain my favourite extant stage direction of the period (most stage directions are an editorial fancy) ‘enter Faustus to conjure’ there is also this crucial moment.Marlowe clearly saw people at the zenith as having winged feet. Faustus, having travelled round the world at the speed of light, elects to walk home to Wittenberg. Walk! He could have been there in minutes with Mephistophilis’ help. He could have flown by magic chariot. But his line ‘I’ll go on foot’ says it all – this is a man who has given up, and knows he is preparing for death, and tramps dispiritedly home on his own rather than being magicked there. It is a pivotal point in the story.Although The Jew of Malta does not contain so many references to getting around, I’ve been thinking a lot about means of transport in the play. Colin and I have been working quite hard on exits and entrances - or arrivals and departures – in order to get a sense of how flexible our set needs to be. We started off by working through the play, talking about each arrival and each departure as it came up. We have now replaced this discussion with a complicated chart, and it shows that arrivals (often by sea) and people secreting themselves in corners of the stage are going to be crucial if we are to express the mystery and secrecy, as well as the high drama of the play. More next time…