HAUS DIGITAL

FAUST: Hell and Back

For three years Alexandra has been  obsessed with seeing “Faust” directed by the Romanian Silviu Purcarete.

The first reviews of the play’ came out after it was staged in Sibiu, European Capital of Culture in 2007, for the first time. They were amazingly good! So Purcarete had good reason to convince the Ministry of Culture to give him funds to take the play to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. There Ofelia Popii received the Herald Angel Award for her character, Mephisto. The play won many more prizes and impressed audiences throughout Europe. The play had a striking picture portraying men with pig masks attached to its title. Intriguing!

The play cannot be staged in a normal theatre as the crops would never fit in or they would be an extraordinary fire hazard. It’s curious how the play passed the “health and safety” procedure in Edinburgh! “Faust” is played in an abandoned warehouse, a setting that enables the director to take you straight into inferno.

The setting in which Faust makes a pact with the devil starts by looking as a mental house, all in white, dusty, full of medicine and organs in formol and then it gets stained with blood, transforming itself into a nightmare scene. Tromp l’oeil effects are the essence of the setting but the most disturbing fact about it remains Mephisto’s appearance. Ofelia Popii plays the quintessential hermaphrodite, she could have just jumped out of one of Michelangelo’s painting. Her voice inflexions, her body movements, her draconic laughter and her powerful presence give you chills. I was loving her and hating her at the same time. Her Mephisto metamorphoses itself from an old clerk, to an indefinable creature, from a man to a woman, from being strong to being week with an extraordinary ease.

Mephisto is so persuasive that the viewers feel as if they themselves are making a pact with the devil only by watching him. You choose to watch, you choose to go along with him. There are moments when you don’t know if you’re watching out of curiosity, when you’re in hell and you try to justify you’re wanting to be there by thinking it’s a play. At the end of the day, it’s just like participating at a session of exorcism. You feel a guilty, strange, pleasure and then you just want to run away.
Faust goes from being a human to being an entity, he transforms himself and we fail to understand him anymore. As he plays Mephisto’s game, young girls become his pray and humans start being pigs. You get invited to participate in the mess and filth that humanity has become. As characters with pig faces carry you into inferno, you go along feeling degraded and fearing being “butchered”.
The music is a sort of psychadelic-Wagner composed by Vasile Siril, the costumes are Lia Mantoc’s, the video projections belong to Andu Dumitrecu and the scenographer is Helmut Stümer. The play also has elements of a conceptual art exhibiton with a play in a play, video projections of a Mephisto blended in with Faust and creatures flying over your head spitting our fire.

Paradoxically you feel both pure and dirty at the same time as the play takes you to hell and back and makes you doubt your humanity.  Never have I been so engaged with a play and never have I seen someone act as well as Ofelia Popii. After the play I could not say a word for the rest of the night.  Purcarete’s “Faust” is mind-blowing. All that’s left after it is … silence.