Faust
Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Andrew Haydon
posted 22 August 2005

This radically truncated version of Goethe's Faust myth from Poznan's Nowy Theatre has been garnering some enviable reviews and critical plaudits. On this showing, it is rather hard to see why. It's a solid enough bit of work, but with the hype it's been getting, one is led to expect something more than solid.

European theatre at the Fringe has now been set an impossibly high bar by the likes of Devero and Do Fabrik, with their beguiling physical shows, which have been enormously influential on British theatre-makers. Nowy Theatre's show belongs in the International Festival, where the work is less often of any real import or relevance.

That said, there's nothing especially wrong with the piece; it does what it says on the proverbial tin. This is a production of Faust performed in Polish. The problem comes from unspecific reviewers giving vague raves and five stars. Such reviews lead one to believe that irrespective of the language barrier, there is enough here to entertain and move a non-Polish-speaking audience, which simply isn't the case. There is a lot of speechifying and no surtitles. Therefore an audience is left watching someone emote in what is effectively gibberish. You get the point, but not the meaning. Similarly, the stagecraft on display, while nice, gets nowhere near the coups of recent years. The stage pictures created by the company are pretty enough, but few and far between, and the physical acting by the company is no more impressive than much of what is on show at the RSC these days.

It is hard to resist the idea that some critics are acclaiming this just to make themselves look internationalist and clever, and in the process, are doing neither potential audiences nor themselves any favours. That said, there's nothing greatly wrong with the show; fans of incomprehensible verbiage and adequate physical theatre will doubtless be thrilled by it all.