Interview with David Bradley - Old man
After the curtain
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Actor David Bradley talks about playing the role of the old man.
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Well you avoid playing something which is, you end up playing a thing if you’re not careful, like a feeling or a, the voice of temptation or the voice of reassurance. And if you think of it like that, it will come out a little bit like one note, I suppose, and one emotion, and it’s not half as interesting as thinking of someone as a real human being. If I think of the old man as Faustus’ father, even though he’s not, because his advice and his concern, desperate concern to put Faustus on the right track gives him real human feelings and contradictions that you, it’s up to you to find them in the text, because Marlowe was capable of writing them even though his play is slightly from the earlier moral tradition of, like the early passion plays where it’s good versus evil and audiences could just identify with one or the other and like cheering on a football team, and it was much simpler. But he was capable of writing human beings in all their complexity, and it’s up to the actor to find all those different contradictions which make us human.
