Review: Faust, Young Vic

Written for Culture Wars

There’s no doubting that Vesturport, Iceland’s primary theatrical export, have gone for flair with their circus-heavy adaptation of Goethe’s Faust. Above us is stretched a giant safety net, upon which all manner of fetishized daemons plummet and clamber. Mephisto and his accomplices scuttle spider-like up the netted walls and peer down on Faust like vultures. Lillith is conjured into existence as if shot from a cannon, soaring an arch above the stage, and Asmodeus bursts through the floor like an elevator out of control.

Yet, for all that, there is a shoddiness that belies their spectacle. Where it wants to be hellish – peeling faces, cloven feet and, thanks to its nimble acrobatics, an inhuman conquest of physical space – it often ends up looking tacky. Filippia Elísdóttir’s costumes seem like an Anne Summers’ Halloween range: all leather, lace and lattices. Director Gísli Örn Gardarsson proffers a very high street hell-on-earth.

That really is a shame, because the initial sense of dark foreboding is truly mystical. In a run-down and institutionalised state nursing home, a slumber of pensioners sit slumped in wheelchairs. The hall is draped with tawdry Christmas decorations. Occasionally, they move, twisting rusty necks one way or another, as if just breathing were effort enough. Everything seems coated with a layer of dust and cobwebs. Intermittently, this motley crew are coerced into a wheelchair dance routine set to Wham’s Last Christmas, rolling themselves slowly forwards, backwards and around, with disintegrating dignity.

Comparatively spritely and bored stiff is Johann, a retired, once celebrated actor. His mind still whirs and his humours still pump, having taken a fancy to Greta, a prettily fresh-faced nurse. By the time he starts reciting Faust, the one role he hasn’t played, the hall is stalked with an imminent darkness. A flicker of electric danger sets the air tingling. As Johann, Thorsteinn Gunnarsson seems at first a teenager tinkering with a oujia board. He plucks an apple off the Christmas tree, as if outwardly displaying his disbelief. A camera flashes and a darker parallel world appears for an instant. The play itself – the simple words of which it is composed – has powers of their own.

When it comes to fruition, after Johann attempts to take his own life by hanging himself with Christmas lights, that darkness gets punctured. It might dazzle initially, but Vesturport’s stage becomes a box of tricks. It is built to function: actors burst through seemingly solid surfaces and drop from the sky, a bottomless hole opens up in the floor. However, with repetition, those frills lose their thrill. They become blasé.

The struggle is that Gardarsson’s adaptation is not full-bodied enough to compensate. While it occasionally slips into cod-verse, its flaw is a surface-level exploration. His daemons are all together one-dimensional. Hilmir Snaer Gudnason’s Mephisto owes a heavy debt to Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, lumbering and lurching around the stage, employing powers of elasticity to himself and the world around him. Alongside him, Nina Dögg Filipusdóttir’s Lillith is lithe and lusty. For the most part, we get the story’s skeleton, though there are some nice strands of thought dashed through. That, for example, Faust’s ultimate desire involves its own impossibility – he chases Greta endlessly, each time coming closer to winning her – and finds himself cycling through a stream of echoing moments as she lends him a gentle kiss goodbye, before disappearing. However, the arch frustrations of affections forever out of reach don’t make themselves fully felt and, as Faust gives up the ghost and banishes his daemons, there’s not quite the emotional momentum to justify the final payoff. He might have learn the meaning of life, the inevitability of its shortcomings, but his lesson here feels academic. He might as well have picked it up from a book.

The same might be said of the whole production, which – for all that it aims to revitalise the fable – ends up playing it by the book. Not Goethe’s book, admittedly, but an aesthetic that has become familiar to the point of hackneyed. The smack of Rocky Horror about Vesturport’s revival serves to coat its more interesting elements, which are in short supply themselves, with sugarcandy and is indicative of a company more interested in trickery than truth.