Following the phenomenal success of the Four Seasons musical Jersey Boys, director Des McAnuff has been given the opportunity to let his imagination loose at the English National Opera, and for his first attempt at an opera (in the UK at least) McAnuff has decided to tackle Charles-Francois Gounod’s 1859 epic Faust.
Although now out of favour due to its impractical scale, Faust may be more familiar to audiences than they realise due to its influence on Edith Wharton, Monty Python and Tin-Tin (amongst others). Following the plot of the first part of Goethe’s iconic drama, Gounod’s work tells the tragic love story of the scientist Faust who sells his soul to the demon Méphistophélès for his youth and the love of Marguerite, a beautiful, yet extremely pious woman.
Despite the subject matter, what is instantly striking about Faust is its lightness - Gounod’s music has the jolly pomp that seems typical to work from 19th Century Paris and Méphistophélès is more gleefully mischievous than terrifying – Iain Paterson’s ponytail, goatee and dandyish dress more Games Workshop employee dressed for a wedding than Prince of Darkness. McAnuff also gets to use his musical theatre experience to stage a few inspired dance numbers (fortunately he doesn’t attempt to stage the opera’s traditional ballet sequence as the production is more than long enough without it).
However, despite (and in some cases because of) this Faust offers an evening of fairly mixed quality, most of the blame for which can be put down to the opera’s epic nature. Gounod’s heavenly (occasionally literally) music demands a vast chorus to pull it off, meaning that on the occasions when they are assembled on the stage the action seems cramped. On the subject of staging, McAnuff’s design at first promises much, opening with impressive use of video projection as the faces of Faust and Marguerite are screened at the front and back of the stage, followed by the reveal of the aged Faust in his laboratory surrounded by the chorus kitted out as researchers and various trappings of modern warfare (although disappointingly this imagery of mass destruction isn’t really followed up again). But by the second scene things start to get a bit overwhelming, as the raucous atmosphere in the town’s beer hall with the local men joyfully preparing for war gets so overexcited that McAnuff decides the best way to express this is to wheel out a statuesque puppet soldier, not for any particular reason, which cramps the stage further.
The show’s length really starts to become noticeable during the opera’s middle section, in particular during the seduction scene between Faust and Marguerite (and Méphistophélès and Marguerite’s man-hungry guardian Marthe). What starts out as playful and amusing starts to drag as it goes on, largely due to the fact that Marguerite’s many protestations make her an incredibly dull character. It also doesn’t help that the action is staged against a video backdrop that looks like badly animated clip-art.
However, all complaints are put aside for final two acts where things start to unravel. Surprisingly the greatest terrors aren’t delivered in the moment where Mephistopheles shows Faust the fate that awaits him in the afterlife - the audience may already feel like they are being subjected to the fires of hell thanks to the Coliseum’s overactive heating, but McAnuff’s vision here is quite anaemic, the underworld being a gang of leotard clad dancers on top of a green-lit banquet table. Fortunately, such visions are trivial compared to dramatic heft of events back in the land of the living as the now abandoned and desperate Marguerite decides to take drastic action (her plight at giving up her virtue to the worst possible suitor suggests that even in the 19th century people were aware that abstinence based sex-education didn’t work), finally giving the potentially one-note character some depth. Here, McAnuff manages to craft a conclusion that pays off the audience’s investment, featuring interesting stylistic flourishes such as the chorus, in a move that would quite possibly irritate Richard Dawkins, donning the lab-coats they wore at the very start of the production to portray angelic forces. It could be said that the epilogue, where the aged Faust finds himself back in his lab in an ‘it was all a dream’ kind of moment, does undo some of the power of Marguerite’s fate, but the scene is so brief so as not to do much damage, and opaque enough to offer room for interpretation.
Flawed as it may be, McAnuff’s production still has enough moments of inspiration that for next year’s staging of Belioz’s take on Faust, director Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python and 12 Monkeys fame) will be facing a difficult challenge to match the heights of this production.
