The Faustus Project
★★★★★ Insane
Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61): Thur 31 July – Sun 24 Aug 2025
Review by Salvador Kent
Half Trick Theatre’s remount of The Faustus Project, in the Belly Laugh room of Underbelly Cowgate for the full fringe, is an outrageous piece of theatre – utterly fresh yet surprisingly Elizabethan in sensibility.
The conceit is simple. A production of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe – with a new and unrehearsed performer playing Faustus every night. They are also subjected to increasingly insane tortures by a Devil, an Angel and a Clown.
Alex Cofield (centre), head programmer at Underbelly, before appearing as Faustus. With his fellow performers for the night: Caden Scott, Courtney Bassett, Alex Medland and Moira Hamilton. Pic: Half Trick.
The director, Caden Scott, plays Mephistopheles. It begins unhinged, and ends up containing chilli sauce, a shotgunned can of Tennent’s, copious nudity, fluids and a puppet.
This is entirely carnivalesque theatre. The actors may be playing demons, angels and clowns, but Half Trick’s focus is on the body – its sensualities, vulgarities and limits. They turn an abstract meditation on the soul into a play about the earthly body — a Rabelaisian Faustus without losing the violent lyric at the heart of Marlowe.
Half Trick have a wonderful ability to breathe life into texts too often stuck in a University library, and not with cliché. The essential radicalism at the heart of Elizabethan theatre – its mass appeal, its formal brilliance is often lost when the text is treated as a sacred relic. By their infidelity in this project, Half Trick are entirely Elizabethan in their performance mode – they have created Elizabethan theatre for today – popular, form bending, and fresh.
terrific fun
This is all a way to say it’s terrific fun. The whole performance comes across like a morbid clown show at the expense of an extremely bewildered Faustus.
Courtney Bassett and Alex Medland seem to be in constant competition to who can be the loudest, the weirdest, who can do the most outrageous thing. At one point, the Faustus has to pick who is the most sexually attractive, with a tally being kept each night.
Moira Hamilton. About to be attacked by a balloon. Pic Half Trick.
Both of them switch between a circus-y modern form of speech and the heightened Marlowe with seamless ease. They are physically ambitious, extremely funny and sinister to whoever is playing Faustus when they need to be.
Caden Scott comes across as a world-weary Mephistopheles, subtly humorous, and perhaps the best verse speaker in the cast. He directs the piece from onstage – correcting the Faustus, checking if its getting a bit too much, yet leaning into the absurd and delicious cruelty of the work too.
standout
Moira Hamilton is a standout and develops a brilliant clown. Grotesque yet inherently lovable. Physically dextrous and willing to do the bit to just about any end.
At the performance Æ witnessed, she had ink rubbed all over her arms, marshmallows thrown all over her face and still had the most brilliant moment of the nigt – screaming in a spotlight holding a purple Grimace-esque puppet before concluding affairs.
If you think it sounds immature, facetious or too weird for you – you are probably right. But this is a genuinely brilliant form-bending and extremely entertaining night at the theatre. Fringe is exactly for this sort of thing – cerebral and boundary pushing, while still being ridiculously fun.
Running time: One hour (no interval).
Underbelly Cowgate (Belly Laugh), 66 Cowgate EH1 1JX (Venue 61).
Thursday 31 July – Sunday 24 August 2025.
Daily (Not Mon 11): 9.05pm.
Tickets and details: Book here on EdFringe.com.
Book here on EdFest.com.*
Half Trick website: halftrick.com
Facebook: @HalfTrickTheatre
Instagram: @halftricktheatre
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TikTok: @halftrick_theatre
Linktree: @halftrick
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ENDS
