I liked it quite a bit. SPOILERS BELOW.
John Douglas Thompson in the title role is giving an exciting performance. I think that alone and the fact that Marlowe's plays are rarely performed make this production worth seeing.
The ensemble is mixed but I'd say that at least two-thirds are giving solid performances while one third rival the lead as both actors and speakers of Marlowe's verse. It's not an easy thing to do… perform a convincing character while articulating, understanding and communicating Elizabethan blank verse. A lot of actors and directors think that if you just play the intention and let the words tumble out then you're communicating the role. But I've never found that that works. In fact, if actors and directors resist the text as verse then it's hard for an audience to understand what is being said.
Alison Bomber is listed as the vocal and text coach for the production and she might have had something to do with the majority of the cast being understood while using Marlowe's language. Unfortunately, some of the leading roles fail in this task and when they're on stage, the production wanders off into the familiar bad Shakespeareland.
But so much of this production, highly edited from the two plays, is working and it's often bone chillingly beautiful. The plays reminded me a bit of Euripedes' MEDEA. It's dramatic core feels pagan or perhaps neoplatonic rather than Christian. Tamburlaine is a brute who believes that his power to rule over others and to take their lives radiates directly from Jove himself. There's not much of a dramatic arc in TAMBURLAINE. It's more of a long, hard, cold but glittering stare into the passion of Mars… war, blood and the thrill of dominating others becomes sacred.
I very much admired Michael Boyd's direction and Tom Piper's set and costume design. Both seemed pared down, straightforward and effective. There's a lot of blood in the first play but it's mostly abstracted in a restrained but compelling way. That changes as the play goes on and the bloodletting becomes more showy. Which is fine as the plays grow more bloody as they progress but I did prefer the earlier signaling of the murder and mayhem as opposed to the eventually blood orgy. My only other quibble with Boyd's direction is the way in which he uses the actors for multiple characters. The use of actors for multiple roles is something that no doubt happened in the original Elizabethan production. But Boyd uses these reappearances to create a theme of karmic return which feels like a morality that is imposed on the play rather than organic to it. Tamburlaine just kills until he's worn out. I'm not sure if he is haunted in his last moments like many of Shakespeare's characters but Boyd stages haunting after haunting. I could be wrong about this because I don't know the plays but I'd be curious to know if Boyd's hauntings of Tamburlaine by his victims in the last few scenes are actually in the text.
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