She flirts, she keeps an eye on her girls, she gets caught up in the dancing. The party scene is framed by drawn blinds, rich draperies, reds and greens and touches of gilt. She’s a formidable hostess.Peter Cazalet’s designs cleverly suggest opulence while leaving room for dancing. Perhaps Wilson, one of theatre’s most promising young directors, needs to spend more time consulting his director’s book of magic.To 26 February (0151-709 4776). How could there be when “the face that launched a thousand ships” is a statuesque lad in drag?Other scenes, such as Faustus’s taunting of the Pope, are more effectively handled; the image of Alexander the Great and his wife is presented as a golden tableau, and the pulling of Faust’s leg by the Horse-courser is given a horribly realistic twist.But of the supposedly sensational displays put on by the Devil to keep Faustus happy, the parade of the Seven Deadly Sins is little more than a procession of schoolboy antics. Given the amount of Latin spoken at the beginning, and the added element of a whispering chorus, you need your wits about you to follow the reasoning behind, and the consequences of, Faustus’s outlandish adventures and devilish encounters.This show is neither sumptuous nor exotic but, on the positive side, there is no sensationalism and scarcely any gimmicks – the magic is modest, the grotesque elements played down.

Tennant plays Faust as an oddly ordinary if class-conscious character, with the result that the central role of this great though flawed work is reduced to little more than a biographical sketch. With the exception of Faustus and manipulative Mephistopheles – who, interpreted by Jamie Bamber in crumpled suit and trainers, was clearly a winner as far as the teenage audience around me was concerned – the rest of the parts are doubled and more, in some cases sextupled.When the wife Faustus is offered by Mephistopheles turns out to be a lewd devil dressed as a whore, the moment is fudged and there’s not a flicker of eroticism in Faustus’s wooing of Helen of Troy. Yet the surface of the work’s theatrical potential is barely scratched, far less penetrated, unlike Faustus’s arm which is first cut and then burnt during his painful pact with the devil.Opting for the shorter version of Christopher Marlowe’s text, with an additional cut of some 160 lines, Wilson has compressed the 24 years of Faustus’s life of supernatural power and knowledge into an hour- and-a-half’s straight run. With the help of foggy mists and Oliver Fenwick’s spooky lighting, the scene changes are managed well enough, and the ticking clock and chiming church bell are vague reminders that time is moving on. Stephen Sondheim expressed his admiration for the work.With greater clout than before, Mr Thoday bought the rights to The Greatest Gift from Van Doren Stern’s family, to make it impossible for anyone else to write the musical, and mounted another bid for the film rights so they could use the title. The film rights, which were owned at one stage by the television mogul Aaron Spelling, were now in the hands of Paramount which agreed to hand them over five years ago.Over the past couple of years, the musical has come to life in the hands of Mr Brown working with the librettist, Matthew Francis. But you’ve got to find the other ones, to make it hang together It is like hanging in air.” He paused “I’ve often thought of it as a kind of Zen experience You have to float But not away.”.

There are many ways to interpret the richly theatrical Dr Faustus, with its spectacular effects, dancing devils and allegorical characters. So it seems perverse of Philip Wilson to direct a production that wouldn’t be out of place as a student offering on the Edinburgh Fringe.
With a cast of eight men, led by Nicolas Tennant as Faustus, portrayed as an unprepossessing 1950s polytechnic lecturer, it’s given an authentic setting in a book-lined library. In the middle, you’ve got one leg caught on one thing and another one on another thing. “It’s all about connections,” he explained, as the late afternoon sun began to pour through the windows “A bit like weaving a spider’s web. Or the result of a misunderstanding.”Like all great artists, he possessed that “negative capability” Keats defined as the hallmark of the poet: the ability to live without too tight a definition of who he was or what he was about. This, combined with his powerful, physical presence, made him seem far younger than his years.It was also what made each new work a leap into the unknown.

He worked very slowly (each play, he said, had taken between five and eight years to write), and even at this stage in his career, writing a play was like a tightrope walk over the void. Even at 81 there was, by his own admission, something provisional about his identity, as though the lava of his being had never quite solidified into the hard rock of personality. Eight minutes into the broadcast, a postmodernly ironic, young, male theatre critic did a dutiful gallop through the Miller curriculum vitae. Finis.Miller was too serious for today’s America, too political, too smart, and much too liberal.

Death of a Salesman was a passionate indictment of the American Dream. Having been scorched in the heat of Monroe’s celebrity – “I wasn’t used to the great ocean of fame seething with sharks,” he wrote in Timebends, “but I unwillingly watched them attack again and again, to the point where fame became an institutionalised paranoia that stunned the soul and made one dead” – Miller also refused to play the fame game. But he said: “It’s something new that serves the original story well.”FROM (BIG AND SMALL) SCREEN TO STAGESaturday Night FeverThe movie (1977) made John Travolta a star but soon seemed horribly out of fashion. The media punished him for it by ignoring him.Miller went on writing undeterred “I’m a fatalist,” he said in an interview in 1987 “I consider I am rejected in principle My work is and, through my work, I am If it’s accepted, it’s miraculous. Every talk-show host and publisher was slathering to get the ultimate celebrity voyeurism story: “What was it LIKE with Marilyn?” But, for 40 years, Miller stubbornly refused to deliver up the corpse of a woman he loved, whom he believed had been murdered by the American media.