„Şi dacă n-ar fi fost decât Festivalul căruia australianul Jonathan Mills i-a conferit, se pare, o nouă strălucire, deşi îl conduce abia de trei ediţii, succesul Faust-ului sibian tot ar fi însemnat destul. În programul EIF, spectacolul are parte de o vecinătate admirabilă, iar Purcărete stă alături de cele mai importante nume din lumea teatrului mondial: Brian Friel îşi prezintă trilogia Faith Healer – The Yalta Game – Afterplay, Mabou Mines îl reinventează pe Peter Pan în Peter and Wendy, iar William Kentridge şi Handspring Puppet Company (Africa de Sud) vin cu uluitorul Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria de Claudio Monteverdi. Şi totuşi, niciuna dintre aceste producţii nu este creditată cu o serie de cinci reprezentaţii, precum Faust! Iar asta nu e tot: chipul Ofeliei Popii, aproape de nerecunoscut sub un rictus mefistofelic, imortalizat pe coperta Ghidului de Festival (ori, mai bine spus, de festivaluri), îţi agaţă privirea pretutindeni în oraş; televiziunile transmit interviuri cu Purcărete, Stürmer şi Ofelia (ciudat joc de destin teatral, s-a spus, ca un Mefisto să poarte, în realitate, nume feminin, şi încă unul atât de celebru!), jurnaliştii se întrec în elogii.
Temuţi pentru exigenţa lor, cronicarii britanici şi scoţieni fac acum exces de hiperbole şi superlative. La prima vedere, reuşita pare mai degrabă o chestiune de cifre şi dimensiuni, iar tonul e dat chiar de Jonathan Mills, care, în broşura de prezentare a lui Faust, mizează pe această „sălbatică, suprearealistă adaptare a poveştii lui Goethe, montată la scară monumentală“. În comparaţie cu asemenea aprecieri, titlul cronicii apărute pe 20 august în publicaţia gratuită Metro: „The devil is the details“, deşi teribil de exact, pare descumpănitor de modest.”
Fragment din articolul “Un festival pentru «Faust»: Edinburgh, 18–22 august 2009″ de Andreea Dumitru dedicat prezenței spectacolului Faust – regia Silviu Purcărete (Teatrul Național „Radu Stanca” din Sibiu) la Festivalul de la Edinburgh. Articol publicat în Nr. 11-12/2009 al revistei Teatrul azi. ______________________________________________
THE TIMES – august 20, 2009
Faust at Lowland Hall, Ingliston
by Benedict NightingaleOfelia Popii as the scary, slithering, shapeshifting Mephistopheles and Ilie Gheorghe as the paedophile Faust
If a modern Bosch were painting Hell, it would very likely turn out the way that the Romanian director Silviu Purcarete imagines it, or Faust’s vision of it, in the adaptation of Goethe he’s brought to an exhibition hall near Edinburgh airport.
We’re summoned from our seats by actors in hog masks and taken behind the stage to a vast space in which a white-suited MC with a black spider on a lapel presents us with everything from forklift trucks from which bodies dangle to vast faces plastered with mud, from screeching dancers to women having sex with pigs, from a trundling rhino to a witch who cackles as she suckles Mephistopheles, from a melon representing a head that’s violently split open to the wizened shell of Faust’s once-beloved Margareta.
Add pounding and often pretty demonic music, and the result is the most overwhelming sense of evil I’ve experienced in a theatre. But if you ransack Goethe’s original play for the scene you ransack in vain.
Since there are even more cuts than you usually get in Faust revivals, you often feel that “Radu Stanca” National Theatre of Sibiu, as the company is abstrusely called, is sacrificing narrative clarity for spectacle. But, boy, what spectacle. There are up to 100 performers onstage, some of them scuttling about in off-white peasant dress, some squirming like the human maggots they’re presumably meant to be.
The Margareta plot is particularly elusive, since she’s played by seven little girls, one of whom is bloodily groped by Ofelia Popii’s Mephistopheles and then, it seems, raped by Ilie Gheorghe’s paedophile Faust. But the basic story remains, though this time it starts in a draughty schoolroom that comes complete with nerds earnestly hovering over laptops, mounds of crunched newspapers and worn old books and a title character whose first experiment appears to be giving a fatal injection to yet another girl. He’s bored, he rejects worldly lures, he craves stimulus: which is why a black dog enters and, a moment later, becomes Mephistopheles, “the spirit of negation”, in a bodysuit that evolves from black to scarlet.
Popii is a terrific Mephisto, a scary, slithering shapeshifter who growls and pants in canine mood, then becomes a Kafkaesque clerk with a briefcase, a florid lady aristocrat with a huge ginger wig, a white-haired oldster and finally an angry, defeated androgyne with black-and-red holes for eyes. As for Gheorghe, his round-faced, bald-headed Faust variously reminded me of an ageing circus clown, a depraved cherub, a pork butcher, Buster Keaton and, at one quirky moment, Christopher Biggins. He’s more the naive victim than Goethe’s questing, terminally dissatisfied philosopher. But you can’t have everything — especially when you get so much.
I could go on and on, recalling the tall, spindly, black-gowned, silver-haired men who represent the world’s vices or the woman who resembles a blend of Marie Antoinette, a pharoah and a skeleton and may perhaps be Helen of Troy. Confusing? At times. Stupendous? Yes.
Benedict Nightingale _________________