It is with these words of Goethe that Valentine Losseau and Raphaël Navarro present their latest production. Initiators of the “new magic” artistic movement along with Clément Debailleul, they take on the challenge of combining the literary beauty of Faust and the depth of its ideas with the enchantment of a visual theatre that reconnects with the burlesque dimension present in the original text and the Gérard de Nerval translation. The strong links that the play and the Faustian myth maintain with esotericism and white and black magic offer them the opportunity to implement, far beyond mere visual effect, fifteen years of researching and developing technical processes and spectacular images.
Faust became part of the Repertoire in 1999 but has not been staged since. With this new production, magic is entering the Comédie-Française and the actors of the Troupe are learning a discipline, but also a stage practice and a type of concentration that is unusual for them. Apparitions, disappearances, levitations, holograms, transformations... the perception of reality is blurred. After the wager that God and Mephistopheles make in heaven, Faust opens the doors of his study to us. And we follow this scholar’s avid search for absolute knowledge in his initiatory journey.

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The romantic movement that emerged in Germany also seduced the Comédie-Française. Very in vogue after the Revolution, its illustrious representatives are were performed in very free adaptations, an obligatory phase before entering the repertoire. Authors who have been forgotten today – Weiss, Jauffret, Patrat, Le Brun, Chénier and Laville de Mirmon – presented in their own names original works by Kotzebue (The Two Klingsbergs), Schiller (Mary Stuart, Intrigue and Love) or Lessing (Nathan the Wise). As for the most famous of them, Goethe, he could not have hoped for a more romantic adapter than Gérard de Nerval for the translation of his Faust. Indeed, it was in de Nerval’s version that the work entered the repertoire in 1999.

It wasn’t until the exceptional circumstances of the Occupation that a play by Goethe was staged at the Comédie-Française. Indeed, in 1942, the troupe of Molière had to welcome a company from the Munich Theatre that performed Iphigenia in Tauris in German.

It was especially from 1989 onwards that the German romantics returned to the stage of the Comédie-Française. Two plays, again by Goethe, were included in the repertoire: Torquato Tasso (directed by Bruno Bayen in 1989) and, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth, Faust (directed by Alexander Lang in 1999), a play initially influenced by the fairground theatre of Frankfurt and by far the most popular of Goethe’s plays in Germany, where performing the roles of Faust and Mephistopheles is a crowning moment in an actor’s career.

The myth of the eminent scholar making a pact with the devil, first dramatised by Christopher Marlowe in 1604, then by Lessing and Goethe, who greatly contributed to its popularity, continues to fascinate us today. The story of Faust has since been taken up frequently in theatre, literature and opera by Mahler, Alexander Pushkin, Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Charles Gounod and Paul Valéry among others.

Adaptation, magic and staging: Valentine Losseau et Raphaël Navarro
Translation: Gérard de Nerval
Scenography: Éric Ruf et Vincent Wüthrich
Costumes: Siegrid Petit-Imbert
Lights: Elsa Revol
Video: Claudio Cavallari et Franck Lacourt
Sounds: Dominique Bataille
Puppets of imps: Johanna Ehlert and Samuel Lepetit
Shadows: Philippe Beau
Assistant stage manager: Émilie Rault
Assistant scenography: Zoé Pautet

Remerciements à Arthur Chavaudret, Clément Debailleul, Yann Frisch, Olivier Poujol, au Laboratoire d’expérimentation magique du CNAC, à Amadeus et au chien Charlie.
En coproduction avec la Compagnie 14:20

Valentine Losseau et Raphaël Navarro tiennent à remercier, à titre posthume, pour leur inspiration magique Rameses, Harry Blackstone, John Henry Pepper et Henry Dircks.

Directeur technique de la magie : Vincent Wüthrich
Coordination des effets magiques : Marco Bataille-Testu
Réalisation des masques : Carole Allemand
Construction du décor : Espace et Cie

and with
Marco Bataille-Testu: Siebel (un compagnon de la taverne), un passant, un villageois ; manipulation magique (en alternance)
Thierry Desvignes: un compagnon de la taverne, un villageois ; manipulation magique et de marionnette
Émilie Rault: voix-off (second feu follet)