Matthew Bissett and Misha Kobiliansky are both terrific in Wittenberg.
(Photo by Nancy Caldwell)
Director Adam Henderson and his team are giving Wittenberg a precise, committed, and creative production. But, despite its intellectual ambitions, the play itself is boring.
Writer David Davalos has set his script at Hamlet’s university, Wittenberg, in Germany, and it’s 1517, so Hamlet is currently enrolled. One of the prince’s profs is the fictional central character from Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy Dr. Faustus — although, when we meet Dr. John Faustus in Wittenberg, he hasn’t sold his soul to the devil yet. Dr. Faustus’s best friend and intellectual sparring partner is Martin Luther, the real-life historical figure who was a key player in the Protestant Reformation.
The body of the play consists of debates between Faustus and Luther, with Faustus championing agnosticism and Luther taking the side of faith.
Davalos’s sympathies are obviously with the swaggering, wise-cracking, sexually hungry Faustus. There’s a huge tell. When Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, it was a historically pivotal act of religious rebellion: in his theses, Luther decried the Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences, which allowed the faithful to buy absolution for their sins. In doing so, he challenged the authority of the pope, which got him excommunicated. But Davalos goes so far in setting Luther up as a religious conservative — in contrast to the more freewheeling Faustus, that, in Davalos’s telling, it’s Faustus who makes public Luther’s challenge to the church. By denying Luther’s courage, Davalos rigs the debate in Faustus’s favour — and this is just the most egregious example of how he does that.
The arguments between Faustus and Luther also become brutally repetitive.
The famously indecisive Hamlet is in the middle of all of this, torn between his teachers’ approaches and psychologically dislocated by the intellectual upheavals of the time. When Hamlet hears about Copernicus’s proof that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, the idea literally sets him staggering. [Read more…]
