THE POINT OF DEPARTURE: WHY FAUST TODAY?

In the five or so years since Peter Stein's project of staging the complete Faust, Goethe's text has seen an astonishing revival on major German stages. The Hamburger Schauspielhaus, Deutsches Theater Berlin and the State Theatre Stuttgart presented their productions of Faust almost simultaneously. Clearly, there has been a surge of renewed general interest in Goethe's major dramatic and poetic work. Moreover, German theatres have begun to feel the limits of ‘post-dramatic’ and ‘pop-theatre’ productions, with their deconstruction of dramatic conventions and textual structures, and returned to great narratives like Goethe's Faust. This work also seemed to present a much more relevant model for the discussion of our ‘postmodernity’ than those experiments in style and performance. Goethe's Faust had emerged between the French and the Industrial Revolutions, the two pivotal events of our modernity, and had anticipated, from this vantage point, not only the evolution of post-medieval man and society, but also their fate, our own rather rootless and anxiety-ridden world.

Of course, such a critique of our time is not immediately obvious to a reader of Faust. We as theatre producers have to ‘reveal’ it. Staging the classical play in such a relevant way serves one essential purpose: it allows us to step out of our time and look at it from the viewpoint of the historical model. Only by historicizing our experience can we subvert current ideologies and stereotypes – Brecht taught us that many decades ago.