The director multiplies Faust, Mephisto and Margit: an old, a young and a puppet Faust, five Margits and at least that many Mephistos come, one after another.

It is a journey under a city, in the eternal night. It is a subway. There is something else, somebody else over the window, in the darkness, there, beyond the world of here – there is, as you know it. Need, Guilt, Problem, Trouble: four materials of angel, some supernatural beings from here talk to Faust, to the one, who is travelling by subway, to the restless one, to the one, who desires the unknown. To Faust – and to us.

A knife flashes. It is a moment of death. An old Faust is sitting on the subway-stage, Mephisto is in front of him. Faust goes to live instead of death – from death – in front of the death. During his road, which reaches over life and mythology, the secrets of the everyday car are opened: from the seat a student, from the map, Margit comes out – and the car is opened, to show surreal fairy-tale pieces of Faust’s visions, madness, deadly dream behind it. Parallel worlds slide into one another: two parts of Goethe’s tragedy are connected – the pictures of the second part are shown at the repeating opening of the half-realistic subway-set, which is the frame-like place of the first part. Sándor Zsótér, the dramaturg, has made a hard work, when he put together the script of the performance from the two parts of Faust by Goethe (and from other texts, which have not been mentioned in the programme – for example from Faust by Werner Schwab). From the extensive lines of the second part of Faust (In Goethe’s play it is much longer than the first one) he emphasizes Helena (and those characters and texts that are strictly connected to her searching), so he creates a text, which can be compared to the Margit-story of the first part. The performance – as Faust himself too – commutes between the two women’s worlds: next to the mythical pictures, which can be connected to Helena, Margit’s world remains insignificantly ordinary. When Helena appears, Faust simply turns his back to Margit, who despite this appears not as the victim of Faust but as of Mephisto: before her death, she wears as a fetter, the giant jewellery, which is from Mephisto.

The performance is changing between the two worlds: the usage of the place puts all scenes obviously into its own world. To make the changing between the pictures – and that way the worlds too – fluent in all scenes missing the dynamic and the airiness: because of the ambitious handling of the text, those viewers, who do not know at least in a middle level both parts of the original play, can lose easily the line of the performance, and break under the tonne like weight of the speech, falling on them. Zoltán Balázs suppressing the action and diction and directs a totally static picture, and because of the directional intention, which creates human-puppets, behind the actors’ minimalised gestures, it is unrecognizable many times, but many times the told texts become meaningless. (The microphones, which are there to counterbalance the lack of the acoustic of the Puppet Theatre – maybe to prove the nature of Faust as a book-drama – many times strengthen better the prompter’s then the actors’ voices.) The director multiplies Faust, Mephisto and Margit: an old, a young and a puppet Faust, five Margits and at least the same amount of Mephisto are changing one another. The actors are all performing in suits, those who play the same roles do not wear any distinctive signs of costume, so we cannot follow all the time, that who play which role – for example Norbert Ács, who starts the performance as Mephisto, from one moment to the other appears as the young Faust; Anna Simándi for the time of a fast scene-interjection without any sign changes from a witch into Phorcys. The real characters’ marionette partners function sometimes as the characters’ souls, then as simple (if it is liked: puppet-theatre-like) source of humour. (The viewers are surprisingly less receptive towards the humour of the performance.)

The übermarionette-actors are in the place of the subway as human beings (some of them even one month after the premiere run up against the set sometimes, and they learn slowly their texts too) and cannot get used to properly to their small space. Their monotonous speech results in less enjoyable performances then the actors’, who move the puppets and many times follow them with entertaining voices. The movement at that time too, works against the words; they cannot tell completely the hard text. But it is a pleasure anyway to watch many times the host of really monumental puppets, which can be thanked for Judit Gombár’s fantasy ("So do not spare / Either the scenery or the machinery here today!” – Goethe: Faust, Prelude on the stage), which can be the real base of the performance for youngsters and adults – it is a shame, that after the disproportionately (it seems to be unjustified from the point of view of dramaturgy) long first part, many from the young viewers will not come back to the second part which is richer in puppets.

In spite of the difficulty of acceptance in the performance there are many effective moments. For example, the seemingly infinitive picture of Mothers – together with many Wilson- and Balázs-like visons which are in a line on the back stage – or the dwarfing of the same Mothers into choir next to Helena. The musical interludes are similar to it: the Björk song (It’s Oh So Quiet), which starts the evening as a carrot – which in its text gives not only the essence of the Faust-story, but it winks with the rebeginning of the performance after the break – or the returning love-remembering motif of the films by Wong Kar-wai. It is beautiful as the time of Euphorion’s death, Helena is about to leave Faust climbs out of the giant veil, which covers her, to be able to present for the first time there as a human being at the last common moments.

"I have but raced through the world; / Whatever I desired, I seized by the hair." – István Erdős’ old Faust tells goodbye twice; that part of the text, which Goethe wrote to the end of the tragedy, can be heard at the beginning and (about three hours later) at the closing scene too. The frame, which is formed that way, changed the performance into the frozen moment of death – The snail-like puppet monster with fish-like tail, that is performed persistently by Zsófia Vesztl holds all thorough the performance the floating of going away. At the ending scene Faust’s young and old egos appear at the same time as his own mirror, but from the background the set, which means the travelling of this world, disappears - Faust gets there: Helena changes the dark tunnel of the city into colourful colours of the other world.

András Sztrókay, szinhaz.net, 2009

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)