“…Great joy is seeing the monumental and abstractive constructions of Hoethe’s epic poem happen to be radical in the manner of Russian “New Drama” and popular for masses.

The most detailed approach was shown by Yukhananov while staging the first pages of “Faust”, the parts that most directors normally run their eyes over: the “Dedication” and two prologues – in the theatre and in Heaven, thus shifting focuses of the play. And doing so substantionally. Doctor Faust’s search rhyme with Avant-guard artists’ theatre schemes, and the ideas and messages of  “Faust” go around theatre meta-reflection.

The decision of inviting Igor Yatsko (present art-director of “School of Dramatic Art” theatre) for the main part was of great help. The lines, rhymed by Boris Pasternak, are intonated by Yatsko in Anatoly Vassiliev’s signature style – with “wrong” and “meaningful” split of lines, sharpening the accentuations.

It’s Igor Yatsko who recites the first “Dedication” (“Ye wavering shapes, again ye do enfold me,/ As erst upon my troubled sight ye stole;”…) and becomes the protagonist of the “Prologue for the Theatre”, where the theatre Director talks with a Poet and a Comic on purely internal issues. 

…All this is happening among the audience, against the background of heavy red curtain and creeps of censing going up its folds.

Yatsko is definitely presenting Vassiliev’s school both in form and intonation: he – the director of the theatre inherited from his Master and he – Faust, trying to stop the “highest moment”; he is an explorer of the mysteries if life and a man, trying to break the tether of understanding, to expand the borders of mankind experience.

And then the dark-red curtain goes up, showing empty space of the stage with a mysterial baroque construction, invented by Yuri Kharikov, in the middle. 

Inside there are four trumpets of Jericho, between them a black cube, and golden winged angels place a globe on it. All these reminds of stage-set for “Aida” from “The Heart of a Dog”, and also of the “Pop-Mechanic” by Kuryokhin where one couldn’t predict what would come next. 

Inflatable toys and pyrotechnic effects, ballet and female choir, satire and humor, classicism and vernacular drama. Yukhananov gives a total mixture of genres (opera, circus with tamed cats and a lap-dog, pantomime, pathos-like declamation and estrade-sketches, local performances and quite sustainable, developing in time and space installations) that turns into baroque eternity.

…A very smart idea – materializing angels and invisible creatures and making them present on stage all the time, as Goethe’s poem has plenty of them.

All of them, equipped with elegant tools, literally and factually color the action, the plot of which Yukananov has nearly completely rooted out (the story of Gretchen is played almost in a patter manner), however having left massive “ideological” monologues about the search after truth and self-cognition.

Right – Goethe’s epos has so much that every director (and we have seen quite a lot of “Fausts” recently) pulls out his own “red threads”.

Yukhananov, according to his doctrine of “mysterial theatre”, concentrates on scholastics, that fully turns a complicated for stage poem into a “play for reading”.

Boris makes the task more complex in order to deal with the form in a manner of a sharpshooter. The play is full of tricks and gags that make the text colorful; no one would get bored – juggling the styles and quotes, improvising and including into the body of the play, say, a song about Moscow from the 60s or the mentioned romance-songs.

From one point he draws abstract ratiocinations closer to the present day’s concerns, and from the other – recklessly and impiously destructs the pathos of a sacred action.

As if directors mistrust contemporary audience, idle and light-minded, and that makes them fill the play with postmodern sparkles. Just the interludes with romance songs here and there in the play are already something.

It turns out to be very funny…”