Travelling is one of the basic motifs of Faust by Goethe, however it becomes really emphasised in the second part of the drama, when we are wandering up until the Greek antiquity in place and time. It is true, that there are „journeys” in the first part too, after the desperate scientist sings his contract with Mephisto, and finally he leaves his study room. He goes to the students of Leipzig, then up to the rocks of Harz Mountains. And this is just the beginning of a real journey around the world, through which Faust and Mephisto together meet fairy-tale-like figures and strange creatures of a fantasy world too (the traditional theatre can hardly show all these).

The basic idea of the performance – the place of Faust’s journeys is the subway of New York – is an emphasized beginning; Zoltán Balázs convincingly uses many possibilities on the great stage of the Puppet Theatre of Budapest, while he reinterprets the travelling from station to station too. Before all these – which is a real surprise – Balázs’ performance mixes the most different forms of puppet theatre with the actors’ performances. This gesture shows up one moment of the creating history of Faust too: it is said that Goethe would have known the that time famous story of the man, who has signed a contract with the devil, at the age of four, with the help of the toy puppet theatre, which he had got as a gift from his grandmother. Goethe himself said later, that an “important puppet performance” inspired him to write the pair of the plays, on which he was working on for fifty years.

The theatrical performance, which is combined with puppets and actors, has thrown from itself at the beginning all the philosophical fetter, which is usually mentioned first in connection with Goethe’s Faust. For different Fausts, who appear in the performance – besides Mephisto and the five Margit-figures – the fairy-tale-like figures mean the real attraction. It is not easy to understand the montage of the strange creatures and parts of set which are inspired by both parts of the drama, but the lazy “station dramaturgy” is characteristic for the second part anyway.

The pink symbolic figure, that connects different periods of time – half fish, half arthropods, so some kind of evolutional hybrid – in most of the scenes it is there as an observer: he is moved by a stick as most of the puppets are too. But the incredible foam made penis monster is a human sized, moving structure: it shows that Balázs’ theatre with the help of humour and joy, which are hidden in the visual formation of phantasmagorias gets rid of the so called fetter of the basic material. The famous Homunculus is a similarly liberating experience, the staging of which many generations of directors and set designers have failed: it gets an infinitely simply stick-people solution which is captivatingly easy.

If we watch Balázs’ performance from the point of view of the traditional dramatic theatre, which today has the most different kind of technical possibilities to show Goethe’s creatures and Mephisto’s tricks, but we can be surprised by those many things which can be reached by this large format integrated puppet theatre. I have seen only once that kind of performance, which at least by its elements can be compared to Zoltán Balázs’ one: when in 1999 the Schauspiel in Frankfurt, that time really young directors, Tom Kühnel and Robert Schuster staged Faust together with actors and puppet theatre performers. Kühnel and Schuster who were anyway Thomas Ostermeier’s classmates, on the considerable Ernst Busch University of Theatre Art, during their course they partly studied together with the performers of puppet theatres, and later it had surprisingly flourishing results. They performed all magic, tricks and fairy-tale-like creatures with performers of puppet theatre, while Peter Stein in his own “uncut” Faust (2000) arriving to the second hard part, he used video tricks, to show up these figures – by Goethe’s words – in this incommensurate play. Balázs’ two and half hours long panorama picture emphasizes its fantastic side between the everyday fragments of the subway, without letting disappear the central story of the first part. At the same time the interaction between the actors and the puppets sometimes get thinner, which shows that on that version of integrated staging we have something to improve.

Thomas Irmer (Berlin), Revizoronline, 2010

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)