Faust

Or Mephistopheles is such a mouthful in Wapping.

I

Those nice people at AIR sent me en e card announcing the opening of their own room in Second Life. I’ve never played Second Life, but I understand it to be a virtual environment you roam around in, going into various rooms, interacting with people or objects if and as you wish. Well last night at Punchdrunk's performance of Faust I played it for real. In Wapping, of all places.

II

They say that the reason that the internet is addictive is because you have these periods of low activity (searching, downloading etc) followed by pulses of excitement as you find something interesting: it is this pulsing of excitement that triggers the parts of your brain associated with pleasure; these pulsing triggers is what makes it so addictive.

In Faust you find yourself alone in the dark, pushing open heavy fire doors not knowing whether you are to discover a black corridor, maybe lit by votive candles or statutes of the Virgin Mary, or a complex of rooms, recently occupied as you can tell from the exotic perfume in the air, the sheets on the bed messy, a record left playing. Behind a blood red curtain you may find a scene unfolding, bodies intertwining. The acrid scent of mothballs. Typewriters freshly fallen silent. Little pulses of discovery, pulses of excitement. Is this why I immediately want to go back? Why I log on at midnight. It finishes on Friday. All tickets sold.

III

Hell of course is other people. Although there is some amusement in watching other people’s strategies. Some stick limpet-like to a particular actor, like their daemon in Pullman’s terminology. Some actors have long strings of people shadowing them, echoing their movements; the actors choreograph their shadows with their movements.

We all wear grotesque white carnival masks. There is something about the mask, not just the way it affects what you see, limiting your peripheral vision, an effect exaggerated in the dark, but it also releases inhibitions, creates anonymity.

Some people stand right in the faces of the actors, almost goading them. Other search through drawers and cupboards, open books, investigate like private eyes or voyeurs.

There is a sense that the boundaries here are not as they would be in the real world or the world of the theatre. In a corridor one of us, the audience, is grabbed by one of them, the actors, or are they the agents of the devil, and pushed behind a clanking metal barrier, a hand tightens on their throat, their face is pushed against a wire fence.

I am alone in a room whilst a woman writhes on top of a man. He falls asleep. Drugged? She searches for his wallet. It is empty. She opens a drawer. She looks for something. A piece of paper. She puts the paper in the wallet with a kiss.

IV

The central image of Faust occurs in a tight corridor, actors lined up, crushed against the audience. Mephistopheles holds a bundle of flyers, which he rips up into small pieces, and sprinkles over us. The pieces are too small to discern what was written on them.

This is a play with a fractured narrative. You walk around the building, piecing together your own narrative, randomly, or according to whatever system you may choose to employ.

But this is a game. Playtime.

Any narrative there might have been has been torn up and scattered. The actors speak in whispers. Pieces of paper are passed around, notes scribbled, but in the dark they cannot be read. The text remains elusive. She puts a piece of paper in the wallets with a kiss.

V

Some people have described this as an installation, which in part it is. Misty forests of fir trees. Room stuffed with books and dolls. Is that wet straw on the floor over there? A scarecrow marks the path. I find myself alone in a maze of racks of filing cabinets, mostly empty, but there is a section filled with bundles of papers, indecipherable in the dark. I am inside a horror film looking out.

It also makes me think of Gilbert and George transforming themselves into living sculptures. This is three dimensional performance compared to the usual two dimensions of stage performance (or should that be four compared to three). You walk around the actors and the action.

A woman stands behind the counter of a diner chewing gum. I am in a three dimensional Edward Hopper painting. Another woman stands in the corner of her room muttering “I hate him I hate him” softly, over and over again. She whispers in the ear of the person next to me “you’ll come back for me wont you?” Whilst she whispers she is sticking a pin into a voodoo doll, pulling it out, sticking it in.

David Lynch described INLAND EMPIRE as being about a “woman in trouble”. This Faust, set in the 1950s, features a number of men and women, all of whom seem to be in some sort of trouble.

Scenes unfold in bars to heavy rock’n’roll soundtracks. Actors move either too slowly or too quickly. I am inside a David Lynch movie, walking around the set.

Mephistopheles serving behind a bar turning water into wine and whisky and vodka. Magic.

But more than anything else, this is a piece of dance. Choreographed across five floors, how the actors keep time and interweave is remarkable. Many of the actors have achieved a kind of aura around them, or maybe they are in an elevated meditative state. To stay in role, despite the swirling pressing tide of audience swishing around them. And the best scenes are dance pieces, the agents of the devil seemingly transporting themselves into demons or imps or sprites, running along and around the walls, swinging up into the rafters, sticking themselves vertically to walls. You can believe a man or a woman can fly. You can believe that a man or a woman may not be a man or woman at all. You can feel as though you are being granted a glimpse through the gates of hell.

VI

It has occurred to me that the point about my reviews is that, unlike say a professional critic, I am not trying to review the art itself, but rather my reaction to the art. Thus if a girl in the orchestra causes me to have a pleasant dream, that too must be recorded, as it is a direct reaction to the art.

They are, if you prefer, subjective reviews, rather than objective reviews.

And it strikes me that Faust is designed to be a subjective performance rather than an objective performance.

But then every person’s experience of art will always and necessarily be very different to anyone else’s, because it is filtered through that individual’s brain.

In a theatre, you sit there and let the art come to you. But here, you go to the art. And yet for me the best strategy was to wander randomly, which felt to me like letting the art come to me, just in a different way.

VII

At the start of the production we were given a flyer which we were told would help us piece things together as we looked back on the evening. It summarised a plot, in seven parts or scenes. Initially I was disappointed and confused. There were characters I couldn’t recall meeting, and the events described bore little resemblance to that which I had put together in my own mind. But then I realised that this was in some ways as much of a red herring as anything else, and best regarded as a summary of the elements of Goethe’s Faust which had inspired the performance, because the performance, being in the form of mime and dance and physical theatre and installation and atmosphere and audience, would and should remain forever elusive, imprinted illegibly on a piece of paper in a room too dark to read in.