Faust – Young Vic **

Winners of this year’s European Theatre Prize, the Icelandic Vesturport theatre company reinterpret Goethe’s Faust for a modern audience this autumn at the Young Vic. They have teamed up with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis who provide the musical accompaniment throughout. I desperately wanted to like this as I am a huge fan of Nick Cave’s, but even his ethereal piano pieces and occasional seismic goth-rock outburst couldn’t elevate this production from the level of pantomime. And I don’t think I was alone in thinking this; the audience were palpably underwhelmed – we were obviously expecting more from the lauded Vesturport.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the pantomime tradition, and this is definitely more Halloween farce than metaphysical tragedy, but I don’t think this is what Vesturport and the director, Gisli Örn Gardarsson, were aiming for despite the Christmassy setting. There is no character named Faust, but rather an actor who plays Faust only to become him as a result of a devilish pact, entered into merely as part of the ‘play’ – he only mimes slitting his throat for blood to sign the devil’s pact, he is only ‘acting’. When we are introduced to ‘Faust’ he is an old man in a nursing home, reflecting on his life and regretting the choices he has made. He was a famous actor and quotes Macbeth on the actor’s craft: ‘Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.’ Perhaps taking this speech too much to heart, the players here are ‘full of sound and fury’ gambolling about the stage, with garish make-up and attention-seeking costumes, performing mildly entertaining acrobatics all to tell a well-known story, much reduced by their telling. What was a straightforward but powerful parable of human greed and spiritual depravity has been reshaped into a jumbled performance with confusing plot developments and non sequiters. The women are dressed in flimsy lingerie and corsets, which could be forgiven if used sparingly on the she-devils ( if wanting to make such a clichéd link between sexuality and wickedness) but even Greta, the pure love-object, cavorts in her underwear, stripping naked to the waist at an impassioned moment with Faust. I’m no prude, but this blatant sexiness and the occasional gestures towards necrophilia and sodomy make this production unsuitable for a younger audience, just the crowd that might find this play appealing.

Energetic and visually pleasing, this performance isn’t a total flop but the acrobatics, which make it such a departure from the norm, are on occasion sloppily executed with Mephisto prematurely crashing into the papered-over trap-door, spoiling his later summoning of the devils -from-below stunt. By its design this isn’t a play for a teen audience so these slip-ups aren’t easily forgiven by a hyper-critical adult audience – the magic of Christmas and Halloween doesn’t work for us either. If the production had been geared towards a younger audience it would have been a great way to get students interested in a difficult and important classic, as it is Vesturport’s Faust is a flimsy thing lacking the existential clout of the original.

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