Faust as you've never seen him before

Taiwan is cutting it fine in celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of France's most eminent Romantic-era composer, Hector Berlioz (1803 to 1869). It's true there have been other concerts featuring his music, but Wednesday's premiere of the semi-staged production of The Damnation of Faust falls on the last day of the year, a mere four and a half hours before the arrival of 2004.

Chien Wen-pin (簡文彬), the orchestra's director, is currently pursuing an admirable program of performing major operas never before seen in Taiwan. Even though Damnation isn't really an opera -- Berlioz called it a dramatic legend -- it nonetheless tells a coherent story in a series of scenes, linked by orchestral interludes and dances.

"I like what the director's doing with this work," said one of the four young dancers involved. "He's set it in the future and it isn't traditional like so many operas and the like. It's also going to be very erotic. I have to act out having sex with a girl, for example, and there's a lot more stuff like that as well."

And indeed at a costume and make-up try-out on Tuesday evening much of the talk was about the sexually explicit nature of the production by Yen Hung-ya, commonly known as Hung Hung (鴻鴻).

"I have two scenes with the girl I'm in love with, Marguerite," said British tenor Justin Lavender, who plays Faust. "In one of them we're on a bed and the dancers show us all the things we could be doing there. In the other we're seen together in a bath." Someone else added that the film and slide projections were going to be "sort-of pornographic."

The title-role in Berlioz's drama is essentially the Romantic-era loner. When we first see him his dominant emotion is boredom. The dancing of some peasants bores him, as does the euphoria of a troop of soldiers. Then the devil appears in the form of Mephistopheles and says he'll show him some of the world's true pleasures. After they've looked in on some partying students, Mephistopheles shows him a girl, and then takes Faust to meet her. They fall in love, and it's only with difficulty that Mephistopheles separates them and, almost as an afterthought, persuades Faust to sign away his soul -- the traditional crux of the Faust legend.

"My reading of the story," said Hung Hung, "is that Faust stands for the intellect. He's unhappy and believes he's wasting his life. Mephistopheles, however, shows him sexual desire and bodily love. He actually helps Faust, and is in fact more human than he is."

Hung Hung is best known to Taiwan audiences for his movie The Human Comedy (人間喜據), plus theater productions of Susan Sontag's Alice in Bed and Harold Pinter's Celebration, but is also a poet, essayist and short-story writer.

Science fiction for Faust

For this production he is transposing the story into the world of science fiction. Faust will be shown as a scientist conducting experiments, while Mephistopheles will stand for the opposing claims of the senses. The dancers will be Mephistopheles' assistants, and some of the interlude music in the score will be accompanied by mimed interaction between the main characters. When Mephistopheles leads Faust off to hell, they'll depart on a pair of brightly-colored toy motorbikes.

This approach, following Taipei Symphony Orchestra's excellent Salome last October, marks the arrival in Taiwan of the style, now well-worn elsewhere, of playfully undermining great classics with bizarre productions possessing their own quasi-independent agendas. Certainly Hung Hung's scenario appears to contrast with the grandeur of Berlioz's original conception, with choral and orchestral set-pieces. But there are light moments in the original too.