Faust, Young Vic Theatre | reviews, news & interviews
Faust, Young Vic Theatre
Faust, Young Vic Theatre
Icelandic version of Goethe's masterpiece too acrobatic for its own good
Saturday, 02 October 2010
Icelandic 'Faust': Somewhere between Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade and Billy Smart's circusEddi
It's hard to overestimate the importance of Goethe's Faust to the German soul, though I did once have a German friend who valued George Eliot's Middlemarch more highly. If there's a real English competitor to Goethe in the literary stakes, it is of course Shakespeare, but that doesn't really work either, because, when not thinking of Goethe, many Germans consider Shakespeare neither better nor worse; simply theirs.
It's hard to overestimate the importance of Goethe's Faust to the German soul, though I did once have a German friend who valued George Eliot's Middlemarch more highly. If there's a real English competitor to Goethe in the literary stakes, it is of course Shakespeare, but that doesn't really work either, because, when not thinking of Goethe, many Germans consider Shakespeare neither better nor worse; simply theirs.
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