Silviu Purcarete's freely adapted version of Goethe's Faust, held in an aircraft hangar sized hall at the Royal Highland Centre at Ingliston, was nothing short of spectacular theatre. It was billed as one of the flagship shows of the Edinburgh International Festival and certainly did not disappoint. The cast of more than one hundred from ‘Radu Stanca' National Theatre of Sibiu gave a meticulous performance spoken in Romanian with English supertitles.
We entered a world of lust, death, menstrual blood and fire, looking in on Faust (Ilie Gheorghe) making his pact with Mephistopheles, a hermaphrodite played by Ofelia Popii. The set was a schoolroom littered with old newspapers, skeletons and lined with desks with Faust's students working away at their laptops. The floor thundered as the dead rose from their graves under the stage whilst fires were burning beyond the windows.
And then suddenly a section of the stage was pulled away and the audience of 530 was directed by devil's minions to walk through to a vast and sensational orgy of copulating pigs and humans, witches flying high up on fork lift trucks, screaming devils, pyrotechnics and Imperium Band's music, watched over by a more than life sized rhino.
Perhaps Hell was a lot of fun after all. Memorable theatre it was, pure Goethe not quite.
Times: 18-22 August 2009