Source: The Guardian

By Andrew Clements

At first sight it seems really perverse to invite Terry Gilliam to cut his teeth as an opera director on a work that isn’t really an opera at all.

Berlioz labelled it a “dramatic legend” and intended it for the concert hall; the pacing of the score, with its extended orchestral interludes and ballads, and character pieces for many of the solo vocal numbers, hardly suggests a living, breathing piece of theatre.

But the hazy dramatic boundaries, and the latitude for interpretation that Berlioz’s recasting of the Faust legend allows, gives a maverick creativity like Gilliam’s the freedom to flourish.

Working together with a creative team of huge experience, he has refracted the story through 100 years of German history and culture, from the 19th century to the Third Reich, from the romantic imagery of Caspar David Friedrich, through the grotesqueries of Otto Dix and George Grosz to Leni Reifenstahl’s film of the 1936 Olympics.

Sometimes too much is packed into each scene – if one imaginative stroke doesn’t quite hit the mark, another is likely to comes very soon after. But the best of what Gilliam comes up with is by turns breathtakingly imaginative and horrifyingly vivid, whether it’s the Hungarian March serving as a backdrop to the outbreak of world war one, Faust’s seduction of Marguerite while Kristallnacht is taking place outside her window, Marguerite’s final scene awaiting the train that will take her to a concentration camp, or Faust and Mephistopheles’s ride to the abyss in motorbike and sidecar.

No punches are pulled, the use of video is perfectly judged, and everything on stage has a musical as well as visual purpose.

Gilliam’s direction of the singers, whether en masse or individually, is detailed and precise too. Christopher Purves, right, as Mephistopheles is the master of ceremonies, by turns suave, demonic or caricature, and commandingly incisve in everything he sings. Peter Hoare as Faust, far right, is a bizarre hybrid between Shockheaded Peter, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a mad scientist; he sings his numbers with great style and sense of line; Christine Rice as Marguerite has two solos, the Ballad of the King of Thule and the Romance, and the still points of beauty. Only the chorus lack of presence disappoints, along with Edward Gardner’s undemonic treatment of some orchestral passages.