FAUST Memories

The dramaturgy of FAUST Memories concentrates in a monologuing solo the streben, the Faustian fury of knowledge, what the immeasurable Nature still hides, still spares man. The Monologue, which takes on within itself all the dialogues that Faust recites to himself in the long flight of a lifetime – Urfaust, Faust I, Faust II -, performs the rite of return, of the backward flight that leads towards the future. Magic and wonders awaken the theatre of the present but it is again man, in his immeasurable difference, who most fascinates our time. Goethe saw, as a young man, a Puppenspiele on the legend of Faust the Magician and the puppets placed in his hands the very soul of the future work. The Puppet, the Angel, the Spirit of Time, Donald Duck will, for Lenz, be the talking heroes of these FAUST Memories.

FROM URFAUST TO POSTFAUST

Francesco Pititto

“Masks and puppets, the whole of Faust II is also a recovery of the childish Puppenspiel; as soon as of the sense of harmonious irony – that which Croce, with his programmatic optimism superimposed on the temptation of decadent anguish, wanted to see at all costs widespread and not only in the last scene – but in that of a continuous juxtaposition of human appearance and inhuman appearance, at all levels, in féeries and phantasmagoria but also in tragic and lyrical tensions. Everyone, not just Faust and Mephistopheles, is subjected to identity changes; even the Emperor, Helen, Homunculus, Euphorion, Margaret herself, the places, the landscapes; even the scene of Philemon and Baucis is the synthetic tragedy of a long and fatal metamorphosis.

Now it happens that, from time to time and from direction to direction, now this character or bearer of word or image or metaphor detaches themselves from the congeria of stylized deformation, from its parodic process, to offer elements of immediacy (of apparent immediacy), of vitality and freshness, such as the presence of a naked body between mannequins, of a face without a mask between masks. In reality, it is an organized optical illusion: because false and true constantly exchange parts.”

Franco Fortini's introduction to Faust, which he translated in its entirety, reappeared to us a posteriori –the stage translation had already been born, therefore– as the clearest critical analysis of our staging. His Faust accompanied towards after towards the selection and rewriting of the parts used for our dramaturgy. The rewriting is evidently influenced by the method of “imaginary translation” that Fortini speaks of, and from which he distances himself in the introduction to his work, but the metamorphosis necessary for the word to be transformed into a word-work has conditioned the ways and objectives of our text. Our translation belongs only to our scene, it would not have made sense elsewhere.

In doing so, “the resonance effect or nostalgia for the original” we believe we have, in any case, kept them intact in the actors' words, as in their contemporary bodies and transfigurations. Our Urfaust already contains all the dramatic elements that will then be regenerated in Faust I and Faust II; unlike the original, these two parts will not repeat them but will present them again after the change has already occurred, sometimes they will anticipate them or in other parts they will modify them.

Thus for Elena tragico-classica, who appeared in a double simulacrum with Helena tragico-romantica in the Ur, returning to Faust II together with Paris meant returning to one's original place to experience, by practicing it, the power of one's beauty: “And’ perhaps a memory?/And’ is this madness taking hold of me?/Was I all this? Am I, now?/Will I be like this tomorrow?/You tell me one word, just one that makes sense!”. Her words, however, will be those of her romantic double, the tragic Helena – “As soon as she was born I was already a miracle./Others are born as always, I'm not. I was born in a white egg./My life is a dream, a magic, because I am beautiful.” – she freed the other, in her she interpenetrated herself to be kidnapped again.

So for Margrete in Faust I there will not be a new meeting with young Faust – “Faust: My pretty young lady, may I dare/my arm to escort and her carry? Margrete: I am not young lady nor pretty/and I can go home without an escort.” – but the death of the child (anticipated by the fairy tale), the madness and the prison of the City will lead her, already changed by life, before singing again to her already old Faust – “There was a King in Thule,/ golden a mug had/conceived Death as a lover/over the Bed.” – and then dancing for the patrons of the obscene Auerbach cellar.

In Faust II she will then reappear as “One of the penitents, first called Gretchen”:

“Around the chorus of spirits/The new who comes is barely heard/Exist, as soon as it is the new/Life that exists, and is already equal/To the holy hosts. See it,/as from the laces of the earth,/from the ancient custom it strips/and from the new, from the ether it succeeds/strength before youth!/Let me teach him:/the new day still burns his eyes.”Thus for File and Bau, already present in the Ur, the transfiguration will be for new bodies of actors, new scenic landscapes in which the chiaroscuro of the original tragedy will, here, take on the bright colors of a post-pop and Disney contemporary. In the imaginative and phantasmagorical chaos of Faust II, so closely related to Goethe's fresco, a fragment of Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion will enter out of intentional posthumous revenge and nostalgia for the youthful streben,:“What is man?/How is it possible that there exists/A thing/that ferments, and boils like chaos!/Or that it becomes rotten like a rotten tree?/And never is it mature./How can Nature bear/These sour grapes/Right among the sweet grapes? – Don't disturb man./From the cradle./Don't tear it from its closed gem,/don't tear it from its child's hut!/Don't worry about him, so that he doesn't feel your absence/And so you find his difference on your own!”

The “Dedication”, not located at the beginning of the work but at the beginning of Faust II, will instead start from that Puppenfaust that Fortini talks about. It's a starting over halfway, Faust's awakening for the last flight backwards: “You here again, moved figures/who one day appeared to my eye./Shall I try, perhaps now, to tell you “Halt”?/Will it be my heart like old dreams?”.

Then Ariel, who closed Faust I, will reopen to the new landscape, to the new enterprise towards the Emperor's Palace, towards the Dark Gallery where Faust will meet the Mothers and the Key to rediscover the new beauty, the physicality of the soul, the feeling of the body. In the Hall of the Knights, the meeting with Elena and Paris will show the way to the new world towards which new openings can be glimpsed. The Sirens and the Dolphins, Erichto and the Lamie, off to the High Mountain and the Open Countryside where File and Bau, reached by air canoe by the Wanderer, will suffer the last violence.

Then Midnight: “It comes, it comes, it comes / Stars disappear, the clouds escape./Now the grays draw lots/Come now, she's our sister/And’ she alone, her name is Death!/Faust: Four I saw come in, /only three I saw go.” The end of Faust, blind to death, will come in the din of a circle of Ducks, distant and vociferous, childhood echoes of a dying man. A Penitent, formerly Gretchen as the poet indicates, will welcome him at the passage between the earth and the ether, followed by the cherubs who inhabit Heaven today.