Goethe's Eight Hour Avantgarde

We sat in the very back row of the Thalia through eight hours of Goethe’s Faust, Parts I & II. The play started at 5 pm and finished at 1.15 am. The night of 1^st October this year in Hamburg was warm – a pleasant 21 degrees when we came out for the first break at 7.45 pm, after the end of Faust Part I; it was a wise directorial decision to pull that through in a oner. The sold-out theatre combined with the warm weather outside made drowsy air-clouds float up to us at the back, sending us to sleep now and again during the action.

            And that action was fantastic; it didn’t matter at all that you woke realising you may have dosed off for half-an-hour, the dramatic body was so rich that you couldn’t be sorry about anything you might have missed. It was an irreverent take on Goethe’s work, with a bit scripted in at the start of Part II happy to proclaim that many of the rhymes in Faust are shite, words pulled haphazardly out of a rhyming dictionary.

            Yet if there are a few duff rhymes in among the endings of the 12,000 lines that make up Faust I & II, then it hardly matters. The series of strong images that comprise Faust’s life – from being involved in the making of paper money, to – very much in the spirit of the Frankenstein times – being involved in making an artificial human being, were convincingly portrayed. The eight and a half hours were a time out of time, a spiritual and intellectual holiday. 

At the Thalia Theatre's Faust

On the October 1^st we saw the second night of the Thalia theatre’s uncut production of Goethe’s Faust. More on this theatre experience later, but we’ll begin with the end, with Faust, now saved, being pulled up to heaven. The text of these final lines of the play belongs to a “Chorus Mysticus”; in most productions these verses will be recited, but at the Thalia they were sang with the whole cast on stage, to a catchy tune, musical style. This is my English translation of what Thalia’s Chorus Mysticus sang:

All which will die on us

Is only allegory;

The inadmissible

is our contemporary;

The indescribable

now has been done;

The forever-womanly

draws us ever on.