PUPPET PLATS

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7110, 23 April 1910, Page 8

PUPPET PLATS

"FAUST"—DONE BY MARIONETTES HUMOUR AND THEOLOGY. (By Our Lady Correspondent.) LONDON, March 11. Somethin" new in Loudon—that- is yet hundreds of years old in stagecraft—has been performed twice this week before crowded, audiences at Clifford's Inn Hall, viz., a. puppet play. Members of the Jlkley University Ex.* tension Centre —three women—manipulated the puppets from behind the scents,, and the translation of the play. “The Prodigious and Lamentable History of Dr Johannes Faust/' from the original German, was also the work of tw.o women, Miss Dora Hussy and Miss Charlotte Barber.

At the performance the dialogue was read as the marionettes ere n cved about, and the performance was r.ade much more interesting, if possible, by a preliminary discourse on the Faust legend, tracing it from the actual I’fe of that peculiar, almost transatlantic, charlatan, George Faust, through the sixteenth century to the stage and puppet plays of the seventeenth, and .'their last performance in Goethe's lifetime. So excellently was the play presented that it was as easy to follow as if the little dressed-up wooden dolls hjxd been living men and women, and the whole was well described as "LMdlanthropy" (the play was in aid of the Potteries Fund and Leadless Glaze Exhibition), "combined with artistic instruction in delightful fashion." The "history" was one that enthralled mediaeval audiences, and certainly it gave to Goethe at least the backbone of Faust. Many of the curious features of the older play as compared with the work of Goethe, were brought to light by the puppet representation. Mcplustophclcs, for instance, in the original version, was not the Devil himself, but one of seven of whom Nerxes, Ashtaroth. and’ Ashmodeua were inferior spirits; and ho was chosen by Dr Faust because he was swifter than the rest. In the oath the doctor had to promise, among other things, "never to wash, nor to cut his hair, nor to cut Ids nails, and to avoid the holy state of matrimony," for the twenty-four years of Mephistopheles’ service. In olden days—presumably about the sixteenth and seventeenth - centuries — these little marionette plays were taken about from town to town, and the two elements absolutely indespcnsablo from the audience's' point of view were humour aud theology—both of those must be well to the fore from beginning to end of the performance. Crude stagemanaging was forgiven, but never lack of humour or theology.