Peter Stein/Peter Schönhofer/Thomas Grimm – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust (2001)

Faust I und II. By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Arena Treptow, Berlin. 16/17 December 2000.

It took Peter Stein more than ten years to realize his life-long dream of staging both parts of Goethe’s tragedy in an unabridged version. He finally succeeded in raising sufficient funds to hire an ensemble and, most importantly, to engage Bruno Ganz for the part of Faust. They had worked together before; early in both their careers Ganz played Tasso in Stein’s famous production at the Bremen Municipal Theatre in 1969 and Peer Gynt and the Prince of Homburg at the Berliner Schaubühne in 1971 and 1974 respectively. However, even though casting was settled, a series of disasters still seemed to haunt the production. A few weeks before the premiere, Bruno Ganz had an accident that prevented him from performing. Stein was confronted with either delaying the project (a difficulty because of certain financial commitments) or handing over the part of Faust to the young and relatively inexperienced actor Christian Nickel. He decided on the latter, and the production opened as planned in the summer of 2000 at the World Exposition in Hanover. It received devastating reviews. The critics unanimously agreed that “after a brilliant Torquato Tasso at the beginning of his career, the realization of Stein’s life-long dream has failed” (Rheinischer Merkur). Since most of the performances at the Expo were sold out in advance, the twenty-two hour long performances of Faust IundII played to full houses. When the production was transferred to Berlin’s Arena Treptow, however, the 460 seats were at most only half occupied. Disaster seemed complete. Fortunately, by the end of October, Bruno Ganz had recovered and returned to the stage. Although the critics were still not entirely enthusiastic–with some notable exceptions–audiences poured into the theatre, either for a weekend (Faust I, Saturday from 3:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., Faust II, Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.) or for five nights during the week. The performances are still selling out and will most likely continue to until the run ends, which is scheduled for 7 August 2001. Due to its overwhelming box office success, it may well be prolonged until the end of 2001.

Since Faust I was first published in 1808, it has been staged quite often, but Faust II is rarely performed. There have been some remarkable productions of both parts in the twentieth century, most notably by Max Reinhardt (Berlin 1909/11), Gustaf Gründgens (Hamburg 1957/58), and Claus Peymann (Stuttgart 1977). Usually, part I is cut by fifty percent, part II by as much as seventy percent, so that each performance takes approximately four hours. However, there have also been longer versions, in particular of part II. Reinhardt’s performance of Faust II (which followed Faust I the previous night) started at 2:00 p.m. and ran until 1:00 a.m. Even after radical cuts, the performance still lasted eight hours. Thus it is part II, in particular–a play not designed for the box set stage of its time and finished one year before Goethe’s death (he sealed the manuscript and put it back into his drawer, so that it could not be published during his life time)–that proves to be a kind of touchstone for theatres, stage directors, and ensembles.

Outside German speaking countries, there have also been some quite extraordinary productions of both parts of the tragedy. In 1975, Klaus Michael Grüber staged Faust Salpétrière in the chapel of the Parisian hospital. Ten percent of Salpétrière was translated by Gérard de Nerval. During the performance, the nearly 300 spectators and thirteen performers wandered through six different playing areas, where it was possible to walk, stand, sit, or [End Page 488] lie down. In 1995, Oi Nóis Aqui Travez staged both parts in a “Faust house” in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The house itself was the stage. No more than thirty spectators could wander through the one story “play house,” with its inner courtyard and forecourt where the performance took place.

Stein’s ambition was to be the first to stage a complete Faust without cutting a single line from the 12,110 verses (which, incidentally, Rudolf Steiner adherents traditionally do at the Goetheaneum in Dornach, Switzerland, when they perform Faust IundII on seven consecutive nights). Whatever his motives and inspiration might have been (Stein himself talks about “serving the text”), the critical question is what he achieved from an artistic point of view–compared with, let us say, Grüber’s Faust Salpétrière, which rather toyed with the Faust-subject, or even with Gründgens’s productions in 1957/58. Was it an innovative performance in its treatment of space, the relationship between actors and spectators, the sense of time, and acting, or did it provide a new understanding of Goethe’s masterpiece?

Of course, inviting the spectators to spend a whole weekend at the performance is conducive to a receptive audience. They do not come exhausted from a day’s work, nor are they already satiated by entertainment and amusement; their time is completely devoted to the performance. Since there were many intervals (of between ten and eighty minutes), there was enough time not only for refreshment but also for a walk and a discussion of the onstage events at length. One could even re-read the text, as indeed many spectators who brought the play along with them did. Thus an atmosphere of leisure and total concentration set the tone for the spectator’s reception.

The performance took place in a huge hall that allowed for different playing areas. Stein and his stage designers (part I was created by Ferdinand Wögerbauer, part II by Stefan Mayer) returned to conceptions of space used in the 1970s, particularly in Stein’s Peer Gynt, Shakespeare’s Memory I and II (1975), and As You Like It (1977). Various settings confronted actors and spectators in different ways. The audience was seated on scaffolding either opposite the actors, or surrounding them on three or sometimes four sides (at the Prologue), at right angles, or even in a circle (Faust II, act 3, Outside The Palace of Menelaos, Sparta); the spectators also faced each other from the long sides of the hall, and the actors played in between (Faust I, Easter Walk, Faust II, act 5). Spectators sat on benches at tables set with bread, cheese and wine, the court table in front of them and the stage above that (Faust II, act 1, Knight’s Hall). They wandered or stood between two stages, on which the actors played (Faust I, Auerbach’s Cellar and The Witches Kitchen), or, on the contrary, they were the ones standing at the two long sides of the hall watching the actors playing in the middle (Faust II, act 1, Carnival). Thus, the spectators could take very different perspectives on what was happening and were also encouraged to change the degree of their involvement in, distance to, or intimacy with the performers.

In fact, I thought the different uses of space in their particular sequence were the most remarkable aspect of this production–alongside Bruno Ganz’s Faust. In many Faust productions, Mephisto outshines Faust (as was the case in Gründgens’ production with Gründgens as Mephistopheles). Here, Mephisto was played by two different actors (Robert Hunger-Bühler and Johann Adam Oest). The sole purpose of double casting seemed to be keeping the audience’s attention on Faust. If Christian Nickel had always been meant to play Faust, such a device would have been more than appropriate. With Bruno Ganz as Faust, however, such a device proved to be superfluous. He succeeded in captivating the spectators with the very first words of Faust’s famous monologue, and through his extraordinary acting style and his overwhelming stage presence, he managed to keep them in suspense and utterly fascinated for two whole days. Without him, the performances would certainly have been less effective.

There were other good actors such as the young, remarkable Dorothee Hartinger who played Gretchen, Corinna Kirchhoff as Helena, and Elke Petri in various roles including the witch in the Witch’s Kitchen and Martha. However, there was also a considerable amount of mediocre acting. Even the directing did not always meet the standards set by Stein himself. Many scenes seemed staged with no inspiration or imagination, and there were long passages that were simply tedious.

This does not prove that Faust I und II cannot be staged without cutting a single line, as some critics rather sneeringly judged. It only shows that the outcome of Stein’s endeavours is not without its problems and that the production could be improved if Stein would continue working on it. For the audience of which I was a member, the benefits of taking part in the performances clearly outweighed the losses. We experienced the weekend as an extraordinary event–something unlikely to be repeated during our lifetimes.

Erika Fischer-Lichte
Free University Berlin

Faust [Part 1] (Peter Stein 2001).mkv

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Runtime: 	4 h 45 min
Size: 	4.01 GiB
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Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/543F5B7F4DB8AF3/Faust__Part_1__(Peter_Stein_2001).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/6BFEB2346FC3322/Faust_Extras.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/F75D94C3871B795/Faust_Part_2_Act_1_(1).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/0F720B61CAB35E0/Faust_Part_2_Act_2.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/40A18825E26AC4D/Faust_Part_2_Act_3.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/D5F70589D6AD29C/Faust_Part_2_Act_4.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/2B5FCA9DF97F222/Faust_Part_2_Act_5.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English for Part 1 and Act 1, Part 2