This production is grotesque: aside from the aforementioned Mephistopheles who flashes the audience (while still wearing bib and gloves)a looming Virgin Mary dominates several scenes, the colours of the sets and lighting design clash and most of the minor characters are decked out in corpse paint. I mean, it's pretty ugly. Deliberately ugly, for the most part. Helmut Griem presents a Faust who has very little way to fall even before Mephistopheles turns up, and Mephistopheles himself is played engagingly by Romuald Pekny as a shape-shifting, deceptive devil who adopts various disguises throughout the play but fails to disguise his primal beastliness. As other reviewers have mentioned, it's a comprehensive adaptation of the play, missing only a scene or two and as such comes in at 169 minutes. The grotesque styling, the colours and lights do become wearing, and despite the more explicit treatment of 'Walpurgis Nacht', it's still not particularly interesting to watch (a fault more Goethe's than Dorn's, to be fair). Unlike the 1960 production, in which the supporting cast were wholly overshadowed by Gustaf Gründgens' Mephistopheles, this production makes everyone bar Gretchen a devil, and consequently both lacks any real tension between Faust and Mephistopheles and becomes visually overwhelming, ending up more carnival than narrative.
