「大專學生劇評寫作計劃」優異劇評 A Blend of Surrealism and Excitement Text: Anna Ieng Ieng IEONG (School of Drama, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts)

Faust auf dem Klosett, a Theatre Ensemble production, is one of the performances showcased in The New Vision Arts Festival. This play uses constipation as the metaphor of our everyday lives and it is very interesting to see "the idea of blaspheming Faust the classic and putting it in the toilet of today". Although it is an adaptation of Goethe's Faust, the main characters in this play are actually the original Margarita and the Margarita of today instead of Faust. Faust auf dem Klosett is a contemporary piece that full of surrealism and excitement. Throughout the play, the audiences are not only enjoying the show but also undergoing the differences between heaven and hell, discovering the real meaning of soul.

This is a contemporary piece that included different media: drama, live music, song, dance, video projection and poetry. Although it has been very difficult to integrate all media into one performance, the two directors, Olivia Yan and Mann Chan, created a fabulous atmosphere to convey their themes by using all these media in both normal and abnormal way. For instance, there are symphonic poems everywhere in the play; however, most of the poems are acted out as songs with the unique percussion music. Since Mann Chan believes that "the 'language' used on stage, other than narrative, when one listens attentively, can be music, sounds, rhythms, dimensions, songs or poetry", the script is very playful and lively.

Dance is one of the important elements in Faust auf dem Klosett. It is obvious that the directors used dance as a major medium for the actors to express their feelings and for the ensemble to tell the story. Since the theme of this play is very surreal and ironic, those movements always begin and end with weird postures.

Furthermore, the live music provides interesting moments for the audiences to get into the mood of the play. Wai Fat Chan, the composer, mentions that Faust auf dem Klosett "consists of poetry sacred as poop, corny love songs, Canto-Pop a la films made in Hong Kong in the 1950's and 60's, desiccated linguistic and acoustic sludge, over-rot themes from classical music..." Therefore, there are various aspects and styles of music appeared; on the other hand, as some of the pieces are very electroacoustic and abstract, audiences sometimes are distracted by the music and break away from the play quite easily. Still, there are lots of interesting and beautiful moments that certainly created by the music, especially the songs that sung by Abby Chan (Marthe, Chorus and Mother) really did provide the blue and lonely but elegant feelings to the audiences.

Olivia Yan and Mann Chan used many interesting and fascinating stage blockings to attract their audiences and produced a very successful play. The whole stage contains three major set pieces: a six sections toilet complex, a huge wall with a long horizontal window and a chandelier. The actors often have weird but alluring entrances to go onto the stage, for examples, the ensemble crawl out from the toilet, actors suddenly appear in the huge window, etc. The directors cleverly utilized the movable toilets. When Jim Chim, a man in the toilet, first comes onstage while the whole ensemble is dancing all around, Jim with his movable toilet received the main focus from the audiences and give them a great impact of ironic and ridiculous atmosphere. Then a very surprising scene happened near the end of the play. There are around seven movable toilets brought out by the chorus members. Then the moment while the modern Margarita (Kearen Pang) reacted with these seven toilets are memorable. The actions that Kearen did with the toilets and the chorus members are sorrowful, puzzling, and full of dilemmas.

Moreover, audiences can define god, devil and human easily by observing the different "level": the god always stays at the upper part of the huge wall, whereas the devil stays on the floor all the time. One of the good examples is the big gamble scene that the god and devil have their conversation with the level differences. They started gamble at their stereotyped position, the god sat on the huge wall with a very high level onstage, devil stayed down and even sometimes crawled on the floor and walls; then suddenly, the god fell from the wall, symbolizing the collapse of morality.

Undeniably, Faust auf dem Klosett is a play full of conflicts; the two directors obviously tried very hard and took risk to play with these conflicts and ideas: sacred versus profane, poetic versus vulgar, heaven versus hell, past versus present, etc. They used different poetry, script, song, body movement, dance, video projection, live percussion and electroacoustics music, to convey their messages and theme. However, sometimes the ideas are too conceptual and complex that confused the audiences. Some of the audiences cannot even figure out what exactly the play is trying to say.

But does that really matter? Do the audience need to understand every line in a play? Is that a failure that the audience cannot realize the theme and messages?

As Olivia Yan and Mann Chan mentioned at the play reading workshop a month before the show, they believe that audiences need not to fully understand their works and ideas in order to enjoy this performance. One of the most important things is that they want their audiences to enjoy and have pleasure while watching their performance. I believe, sometimes, audiences may even discover more and have more fun when they are inside the "thick fog". Faust auf dem Klosett is absolutely a good play that leaves a lot of space for the audiences to use their imaginations and senses.

「大專學生劇評寫作計劃」由康樂及文化事務署（新視野藝術節2006）主辦，國際演藝評論家協會（香港分會）策劃及統籌

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