Faust In The Box

Who hasn’t uttered the phrase “Oh, that was bad. But it was nowhere near as awful as…” at least once in their life?

Everyone, I like to think, has a theatrical experience so miserable that they use it as a benchmark against which all other artistic output can be later measured.

For me, that show was a 2008 Fringe production called Bouncy Castle Dracula in which a group of enthusiastic students bounced about screaming lines from Bram Stoker’s classic novel at each other. Worse still, one could not actually hear what was happening over the continuous, overpowering sound of air being pumped noisily into the giant plastic set keeping the bouncy castle inflated. In my three years as a Fringe reviewer, nothing had come close to it in terms of sheer abject, ill-conceived awfulness.

Then Faust In The Box crossed my radar.

Devised by the German performance artist (for want of a better term) Bridge Markland, this is interminable dross of the lowest order.

For starters, there is little acting involved. Rather Markland mimes along to an audio-book reading of Goethe’s Faust—gurning inanely and employing the most rudimentary of puppetry skills—while irritating snippets of modern pop music are cut (sometimes, it seems, arbitrarily) into the soundtrack. Initially, the effect is to create a jarring disengagement between actor and audience, but after an hour it succeeds only in creating an atmosphere of soul-crushing tedium.

Remarkable only in its ability to make an hour seem like an unbearably long unit of time, this should be avoided like the plague.