The Stage

Faust

Published Friday 4 September 2009 at 13:05 by William McEvoy

“You will see things nobody has ever seen before”. So Mephistopheles informs Faust as he leads him into Hell.

By any standards, Silviu Purcarete’s adaptation of Goethe’s Faust is an extraordinary achievement - on a monumental scale, a ravishing, all-encompassing piece of total theatre that assaults and dazzles the senses.

The production is in three parts, the first two astounding, the last, a little anti-climactic. As the white stage curtain is removed, we see a world in which the rubbish of history and the residues of nightmares converge.

The set, ashen, post-infernal, is composed of skeletons, stuffed animals, tailors’ dummies, skulls, piles of newspapers. A bald child sits on a wardrobe. Bodies seem to be buried under the floorboards, even though we learn that “a corpse has nothing to offer”.

This world out of joint is dominated by Ilie Gheorghe’s Faust, a bald sybarite, drowning in books, a gloomy, self-accusing wanton searching for knowledge. His students are lined in rows behind him, learning to be automata. The stage is crowded with bodies, or invaded from the audience. Wolves cry, faces peer in at windows, a demon breathes fire and destroys a wall, a real black dog turns into human form.

Yet this stunning choreography of objects suddenly ends when the set cracks open and the audience is led from its bleachers into Mephistopheles’ underworld chaos, a vast warehouse of fire, trapeze artists, a mini-theatre, gods and monsters - and the true expansiveness of Purcarete’s vision becomes clear.

We go from the charnel house into the violent colours and sounds of Hades. Like a living Hieronymus Bosch, the erotic, the animalistic and the demonic coincide in a world of spells and illusions. Bodies dangle and writhe overhead, a waterfall of fire cascades down: music pounds, distorted bodies, decapitated animals, the vision is intense and all around us.

Purcarete’s Faust ends on a quieter note as Faust is finally laid to rest. It is a once in a life time piece of theatre, once seen, never forgotten, leaving you shell-shocked and disbelieving.

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