MARATHON MENSCH
By Jonathan Kalb
It would be hard to exaggerate
the tenacity of Faust in the modern imagination. In the
centuries since the appearance of Johann Spiess' Faustbuch
in 1587 and Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of
Doctor Faustus shortly thereafter, the adjective "Faustian"
has become common coin around the globe, an astonishingly malleable
trope for overreaching of every stamp. Faust himself,
moreover, or someone very like him with a different name--an esoterically
learned man, typically a secluded loner, who makes some sort of
pact with crafty powers to realize his visions and desires and
then confronts awful consequences--has been the subject of more
spinoffs, remakes, and adaptations than any other classical figure
except possibly Hamlet: tragedies, comedies, novels, stories,
operas, puppet plays, films, dances, paintings, sculptures, comic
strips, biographies, social studies, political tracts, and more,
from dozens of different cultures, with dozens of different ideological
slants. Faust clearly touches our quintessentially
modern suspicion that the way we live has been purchased with
a part of our humanity, and by common agreement, he belongs to
the world, not just to Germany.
Strangely enough, though, the work generally acknowledged as the
most morally capacious, psychologically insightful, and politically
intelligent conception in the Faust literature
is an exception. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's monumental life-work--the
two part Faust , written over six of modernity's
most tumultuously definitive decades and completed in 1831 shortly
before his death--is a masterpiece that happens also to be a national
chestnut. Pushkin once called it "an Iliad of modern life," but
Richard Wagner, who wanted to build a theater and found an ensemble
for it, said Germans should read it like a national Bible. Georg
Lukács spoke of it as "the simultaneous affirmation and
negation of the tragic, "a consummate" drama of the
human species," yet the far less ideological Thomas Mann stressed
its "folk character" and linked Goethe's genius to that of Luther,
Nietzsche and the tradition of specifically German idealism. In
the 20th century, German theaters produced Faust practically
every decade in lavish, widely attended productions, with audiences
converging on it as a sort of communal confessional inviting them
to brood on the shifting state of their souls. (Gustaf Gründgens
dominated this history with his three productions, over 25 years,
presenting Mephistopheles as the most interesting character.)
Elsewhere, the work has been much more revered than played, particularly
in the Anglophone world, where directors tend to find it wordy,
rhetorical, and old-fashioned.
I've seen a handful of
Fausts in the United States. All were competent, about three or
four hours long, and based only on Faust I,
a powerful but conventional work driven by a story of love, betrayal,
and heartbreak whose outlines were as familiar when it was published
in 1808 as they are today. Before 2000, I had never seen Faust
II--a much less perishable, extraordinarily free-form
product of Goethe's middle and old age, replete with arcane allegorical
references and involute interior action. For anyone who speaks
German and enjoys watching the German theater throw itself extravagantly
into absurdly monstrous and cerebral projects, as I do, Faust
II is Mount Everest. The Germans perform it occasionally,
always vastly shortened, and several high-profile directors (Klaus
Michael Grüber, Claus Peymann, and Wolfgang Engel) have combined
it with Faust I over the past few decades in
productions that ran six to nine hours. For whatever reasons,
I never got there, but Peter Stein's 21-hour production of the
entirety of both parts in Hanover in July, 2000, by contrast,
had me itching to hop a plane.
The main attraction this time was Stein himself, a legendary figure
who hadn't directed in Germany since 1991 and, at 63, was fulfilling
a 30-year-old dream. Stein was a co-founder of the Berlin Schaubühne
and its chief creative force during its glory days in the 1970s
and early 80s. He had proposed Faust for the
theater's initial season in 1969-70, then became distracted by
other big projects (such as Peer Gynt in 1971 and The
Oresteia in 1980), and had just begun planning
Faust again when the Schaubühne fired him
in 1985. His declared ambition from that point on, which frightened
nearly everyone he approached as a potential collaborator, was
to produce the whole work for the first time, without cutting
any of its 12,111 lines or imposing any stage action not specifically
mentioned by Goethe. (Actually, an uncut Faust has
been presented every few years since 1938 by a partly non-professional
cast at the anthroposophical center called Goetheanum in Dornach,
Switzerland, but Stein dismissed this effort as "cult worship"
rather than theater art, saying his production was the real "world
premiere" because it was the first by a wholly professional company.)
He worked assiduously
to realize his titanic plan even while employed as director of
non-musical theater at the Salzburg Festival from 1991 to 1997,
giving public readings in various European cities and recording
all of Faust II, solo, on a commercially released,
8-hour, 7-CD set. Only when the Hanover world's fair Expo 2000
offered its sponsorship, which led to other large corporate and
government grants, did the financing for the 30-million Mark ($20
million) production come together. It opened as part of the fair,
ran there for four months, and then fulfilled a planned two-year
run in Berlin and Vienna, consistently selling out its 398-Mark
($265) tickets a month ahead of each performance.
I was extremely curious about it even after reading the German
reviews, which unanimously trashed the production for what the
critics saw as its deadly literalism. Stein's Oresteia
had long been a pinnacle of my theatergoing, and these were many
of the same critics who had detested the painstaking realism in
his 1984 production of The Three Sisters, which I also
found breathtaking. I distrusted their motives, suspecting pet
theories about both Stein and Goethe. Meanwhile, Stein was belligerent.
"You take this text especially seriously," said an interviewer
to him during his Hanover rehearsals. "What else?" answered the
now respectable elder statesman who a few years ago was an upstart-evangelist
of director's theater. "Should I take myself seriously? No! These
illustrious people who pursue director's theater regard themselves
as excessively important and aren't exactly bursting with inspirations
because of it."
As it turned out, I was
myself taken aback by the flatfootedness of the show's literalism.
I also found a great deal to admire, though, as did the 460-odd
Germans in the audience with me, apparently, since they all stayed
to the end and carried on animated, appreciative conversations
during the ten intermissions over two days. (In Hanover, one saw
the production either in six evenings or over a marathon weekend,
thereafter only in two-day marathons.) There is a venerable truism
that all great artworks are mirrors that send people away with
a version of what they came looking for. In Stein's Faust
, I seem to have been looking for some capacious statement
about the essence and promise of theater at the end of print culture.
Stein didn't work from this premise, I presume, and I wasn't aware
it was so pronounced in my mind until afterward. The show spoke
eloquently to it, though--not only through the play itself, but
also in its overtly commercial venue, in the light the production
cast on the limitations of its hero-director, and in the light
he did and didn't manage to cast on the totality of Goethe's conception.
Stein's Faust
was presented by its publicists as an unintimidating,
popular event--one that happened to have literary respectability
but could be as much fun to attend as a circus or carnival. Its
television commercials featured high-tech montages with lots of
fire and acrobatic exertion, and its posters shamelessly packaged
Goethe as tourist kitsch, immodestly featuring the names STEIN
and Faust (both peremptory German nouns, meaning "stone"
and "fist") adjoined in mirror image. Inevitably, Expo 2000 was
also part of the attraction--a preposterously large fair stretching
over hundreds of acres, with more than 150 futuristic national
pavilions reflecting its theme of the bright promise of technology.
Faust functioned as the de facto German cultural pavilion,
assuring visitors that the brave new world of unimpeded corporate
boosterism--evident everywhere in the park's sea of logos--would
never leave theater or the classics behind.
The performance took place in a huge, characterless, hangar-like
hall divided with black curtains into two performance areas with
a corridor in between. (In Berlin, the venue was an old bus depot.)
The audience moved back and forth between these spaces every 20
to 60 minutes, watching action on one side while the other side
was rearranged for the following scene. This system was more democratic
than most people able to pay 398 DM for a theater ticket were
probably comfortable with, but the constant to-ing and fro-ing
soon became routine and was often amusing--as when the crowd arrived
to find it had to stand, or when it rushed for the front rows
in anticipation of scenes with nudity. The compulsory movement
also created a peculiar social environment, fostering innumerable
impromptu exchanges among strangers. In the "Rittersaal" scene
(about two-thirds through), for instance, the audience was seated
at long tables and left for ten minutes or so to chat with neighbors
over individual plates of real wine and cheese.
This environment, more
than anything else, colored my thoughts and impressions over the
two days. I had read several intelligent articles beforehand about
the meaning of Faust for Germans at the present cultural
moment. One, by Peter Kümmel in Die Zeit, suggested that,
although Stein was no doubt indifferent to Wagner's dream of "the
spiritual unity of the Volk," he had nevertheless shrewdly exploited
the economic boom of the late 1990s to realize Wagner's more practical
project of founding an ensemble and building a temple for "the
Bible of the Germans." (The production was registered as
a for-profit corporation, with 80 employees contracted for three
years.) Another essay, by Richard Herzinger in Theater heute,
focused on "the harmonizing ending" of Faust II, in which
the "striving" Faust is redeemed by heaven despite his
sins and the fact that Mephistopheles has technically won their
wager. Herzinger wrote that this redemption did have "something
arbitrarily forced about it," but it nevertheless gave the work
power today as "a parable of the German happy ending": "The unified
Germany of 1989-90 was founded on the bankruptcy of delusory projects,
not only nationalist but also utopian-socialist in nature. The
price for the redemption of the constantly striving, endeavoring
Germans is the abandonment of their high-flying fantasies of world-reclamation."
There is truth in both these theories. I wouldn't argue specifically
with either of them. I would question their immediacy for the
average spectator, however--certainly for a foreigner like me
but also for ordinary Germans. Faust in the theater (as
distinct from the classroom or the scholar's study) is too engaging
as a narrative to be primarily a forum for worship, and its story
doesn't revolve around, or issue from, its ending in any significant
sense. One is pulled in, for instance, by the love story, by pure
titillation in scenes such as the Witches' Kitchen and the Walpurgisnacht,
by Faust 's various forms of overreaching (or "striving,"
if you prefer), and by the fact that he and Mephistopheles seem
more and more like opposing aspects of a single, quintessentially
human nature as the play goes on. Among the snatches of conversation
I overheard during the many pauses between scenes were: an argument
about whether Faust 's blood-signature irrevocably bound
him to his devil's bargain, a discussion of whether the Earth
Spirit (a filmed closeup of a face surrounded by flames) was sufficiently
"horrible," and whether Helen of Troy was sufficiently "glamorous."
During the first day's long dinner break, two Hanoverians I'd
never met before (an elderly woman and her granddaughter) fell
into a remarkably sophisticated conversation with me about Mephistopheles'
"scoffing" nature and its connection to the degrading trivializations
of television.
For my part, I was reminded
more than ever that Faust is basically a story about
a lonely, isolated professor who yearns for a more active and
erotic relationship with the outside world. He feels imprisoned
in his own inwardness, having brought his knowledge, feeling and
intuition to the pinnacle of refinement at the cost of his connections
to everything and everyone outside them. Thus Goethe allegorizes
the painful transition from the torpid, closed, and medieval "little
world" (Goethe's phrase) of Margarete (Gretchen) to the more brightly
dynamic, intellectually open but treacherous world of modernity.
Stein's most significant achievement was to apply this modernity
effectively to our time, dramatizing the transition to the age
of shrinking attention spans, disappearing language faculties,
and mass isolation behind flickering screens. For much of the
marathon audience, the production's social immersion--21 hours
of jostling actual, unpredictable, sensually engaged comrades
in an intellectually aroused crowd--was probably as novel and
disorienting as Faust 's.
Any fair-minded observer would concede that the German critics
were justified in many of their practical, scene-by-scene objections.
The settings (designed by Ferdinand Wögerbauer for Part
I and by Stefan Mayer for Part II) were restrained
and cautious to a fault. Most scenes were played in unremarkably
conventional or generic environments, and several were inexplicably
stuffed into bizarrely cramped compartments or spread out in open
areas dully and sparsely adorned. The occasional touches of modernism--a
varicolored, climbable cliff-face during the Walpurgisnacht, for
instance, and a truncated pyramid with magnetic trees, human figures
and other shapes moved around by actors during the Classical Walpurgisnacht--seemed
passive and merely decorative. Heinrich Brunke's dynamic lighting
often felt like a compensation for visual inertness. Now and then,
one could perceive a plan to chart an expansive journey outward
from Faust 's claustrophic, Kafkaesque study, with its
tall, dusty shelves crammed full of old tomes, reams and scrolls
of paper, to arenas of greater and greater airiness and light,
but this wasn't consistently followed. Moidele Bickel's costumes
were inert, unimaginative: standard Goethe-era garb supplemented
by fantasy-outfits straight out of commonplace storybooks, with
only rare blips of assertive originality (such as a rolling-metal-cart
hind-quarter for the centaur Chiron).
A few scenes were exceptionally designed. At the end of Part I,
for instance, Gretchen was incarcerated in a cubic metal cage
too small for her to stand or fully stretch out in. In Act II
of Part II, actors on a conveyor belt used roller blades to create
the impression of swimming. And at the end of Part II, Faust
's heavenly redemption was depicted with droll magnificence
as a sort of sacred abduction by aliens: a giant metallic spiral
walkway descended from the ceiling and angels dressed in clinical
white helped Faust remove his actor's makeup
and clothes and then escorted him slowly upward, flanked by nearly
naked boys of decreasing age. Fundamentally, however, Stein clearly
made a decision to abandon interpretively active and challenging
modern stage design--used so stunningly in all his previous productions--as
if anything less than pure literalism would have smudged the figurative
vitrine he thought to construct around his tome of beloved old
words.
His choices were sometimes
plainly ridiculous and amateurish: having Mephistopheles step
out from behind two 15-foot-tall, bright red boots when the text
says that he alights from "seven-league boots," for instance,
or bringing a real black poodle onstage when Mephistopheles is
said to enter as one. Furthermore--and this is a weightier matter--he
didn't prove his main premise: that the entirety of Faust
possesses a deep momentum and grand aesthetic arc in
performance that benighted theater people have overlooked for
nearly two centuries. Major sections of Faust II
(his main reason for doing the production, he said) appeared superfluous
in theatrical terms, just as previous directors said they were.
The hour-long carnival that Mephisto stages at the Emperor's palace,
for example--staged here by Stein as a tumultuous parade of monotonous,
sparkling kitsch--came off as an obscure, tedious, and dated satire.
Similarly, the fourth act of Part II--with its stereotypical thugs
and its battle on a mountain spur that takes place entirely offstage
while the principals chat and watch--was left to wallow in its
own dramatic torpor.
This flagrant failure of imagination aside, however (and notwithstanding
Stein's crass publicity blitz), there is also a sense in which
the production benefited from low expectations--especially in
Hanover. Bruno Ganz, the 59-year-old actor around whom the role
of Faust was built, could not perform in Hanover
because he had seriously injured himself in rehearsal. In his
place appeared Christian Nickel, a 31-year-old actor who was supposed
to share the role (playing the rejuvenated lover of Gretchen,
for instance) but who instead performed the entire show. One had
to sympathize with Nickel, thrust as he was into an impossible
mission. Neither vocally engaging nor physically spectacular,
he was competent, flexible and sometimes genuinely moving. The
surprise was that he became considerably more than that in the
end, simply by being a more or less neutral and efficient conduit
to Goethe.
Six months later, I saw
Ganz's performance when it was broadcast on German television
(he had returned to the role in Berlin). As might be expected,
he added heft, gravity, realism, variety, and maturity to Faust
. Furthermore, Nickel blossomed under his lighter burden,
and the alternations and combinations of the two actors were interesting
and illuminating. Because of Ganz's ability to add virtuosic "star
turns," however--his desperate exasperation and self-loathing
leading up to Faust 's suicide attempt, for
instance, and his leering, gummy grins while gazing on the Walpurgisnacht
orgy--he also sometimes stood in competition with the words. He
was never gratuitously self-indulgent, but he did assert a specific
and forceful presence. With Nickel alone, by contrast, one had
no thoughts of either fireworks or incompetence and thus sat back
to relax into wave upon wave of rhymed eloquence about human appetite,
fulfillment, disappointment, and despair.
Interestingly enough, the portrayal of Mephistopheles added to
this impression. This role was also shared by two fine actors,
Johann Adam Oest and Robert Hunger-Bühler, who seemed clearly
and significantly differentiated at first: one was droopy-eyed,
languorous, and seductive, the other worried, weary, and weatherbeaten.
As the production went on, though, they grew less and less distinguishable,
and by the end their contrast hardly seemed important. For that
matter, only two other actors stood out amidst the production's
600-plus roles played by the 33-member company: Dorothee Hartinger
as the superbly restless Gretchen, and Corinna Kirchhoff as the
wonderfully vain Helen of Troy. Everyone else blended so effectively
and anonymously into the choral background that I wondered afterward
how Stein convinced them to devote three years of their careers
to this project.
All the German critics
complained about the show's long boring sections, and on one level
they were right, but on another I think they missed the point.
A certain quotient of boredom was necessary to abate the appetite
for spectacle. As often happens in Beckett, the boredom drew one
into an expansive listening posture whereby the literalism became
a cradle for the deceptively "artless" art of the poetry (that
famous verse in which, as Thomas Mann said, "every sort of high-flownness,
every poetic extravagance, is foreign . . . [yet it] keeps on
the middle path with a quiet masterly boldness").
A particularly chilling moment, for instance, was Mephistopheles'
mocking lament for life's transitoriness late in Part II.
Was soll uns denn das ew'ge Schaffen!
Geschaffenes zu nichts hinwegzurafffen!
"Da ist's vorbei!" Was ist daran zu lesen?
Es ist so gut, als wär' es nicht gewesen . . .
(Then what's the use of eternally striving,
When all that's created is swept away to nothing!
"There, it's over!" What's to be learned from that?
It's just as good as if it never were ...)
I have no memory whatever of which actor delivered these lines,
or which expressions and intonations he used. I do remember perfectly,
however, how after 20 hours or so, my mind had settled into a
state of intense concentration on ideas and their formulation,
on the wit, elegance, fluidity, and curiously timeless life of
Goethe's words. During a passage like this, Beckett--with his
lifelong theme of futile striving married to not-quite-final renunciation--seemed
as much a precedent for Goethe as an heir to him. The hierarchy
of real chronology was irrelevant. Especially with the magnificent
metal spiral descending from the flies, I felt transported to
one of those circular timespaces of Borges' where Kafka influences
Hawthorne, where Racine and Mallarmé count as "the same
writer," and the very notion of confident orientation is a hallucinatory
dream.
Stein's key perception in Faust was the need
to preserve this atmosphere of the greatest possible openness
to wide-roaming reverie, even at the risk of seeming to abdicate
his directorial duties. No one could ever accuse this director
of excessive humility, but he does seem to have understood that,
with this play, at this time, he couldn't present himself as an
omniscent hero bearing definitive answers. For all his bravado
and self-promotion, he grasped that monumentalism itself is now
suspect, even though millions are still drawn to it, and that
the public today prefers its idols to have clay feet. Hence the
anomalous triumph of a director, and a Faust ,
in whom megalomania dances with caution and humility: neither
Übermensch, nor even Übermensch-wannabe, but rather
a striving, bungling, overcommitted man of the earth.
____________
This essay originally appeared in Salmagundi.
