Faust Gate, London
***
There is witchery in Notting Hill, where Georgia's Basement Theatre has taken up residence as part of the Gate's East Goes West season. This is a new take on Goethe's story: Faust's pact with the devil takes the form of a morphine-induced hallucination.
In a mental hospital an elderly man is deluded into thinking he is Faust. His doctors, whom he believes are the archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael, administer an injection and withdraw to watch the results. What follows is a version of Faust's pact with Mephisto, his love for and betrayal of Gretchen and the final suffering, that is played entirely by puppets. As the programme succinctly points out, this is not a puppet show but a show with puppets.
Doing things in miniature doesn't always ensure a magnification of Goethe's original, and undoubtedly something is lost because the script is not translated. But for all its inconsistencies, this is an enjoyable and occasionally breathtaking piece of theatre.
Superb manipulation combines with some devilishly imaginative puppets (Mephisto's ally, Marta, has the most startling embonpoint), and there is a really witty musical soundtrack that can be ironic, smoochily seductive in 50s crooning style or romantically soulful. Gretchen's final rejection of Faust and her acceptance of death is sufficiently stirring to make one wonder whether it is you or the puppets that are being manipulated.
What this show successfully highlights is the way the combined presence of manipulators (there are always several to each puppet here) with puppets can sometimes heighten theatrical emotion and distil it to a degree that would be impossible for a single human actor, however talented. The effect is intensified in this show by having the actors who play the doctors also providing the voices for the puppets. They do this through microphones but in full view of the audience, so that everything that happens on stage has a kind of double impact. It is like witnessing something both at a distance and in close-up simultaneously.
Until July 29. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
