Faust makes much of mockery and magic

Jaewoo Kim as the hapless Faust. Picture / Neil McKenzie

NBR New Zealand Opera is proud of its latest presentation, Gounod's Faust, which opens in Auckland tomorrow night. It's "a bold and dramatic new production", and we are promised transportation to "a surreal, mystical world filled with temptation, opulence and manipulation".

Faust is the first major production to be originated by the company for some time and the director is Mike Ashman who made his name with a stunning Norwegian Ring Cycle back in the 90s. A few months ago, he collected glowing reviews for his staging of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire with mezzo Sally Burgess.

"I am absolutely thrilled to be doing the Gounod, a piece that in my generation has almost disappeared from our stages," says Ashman. "I knew all the tunes but almost didn't know what went in between.

"I had bought into the idea that it was just a Frenchified version of Goethe, when in fact it's not that at all, as I discovered when I started working on the score."

Goethe's Faust is not all hell, damnation and witchery. Ashman had been thrown the German play "in lumps" when he was at school but now he is aware of its humour.

"The character of Mephistopheles as a sardonic joker is completely there in the Goethe and brilliantly taken over by Gounod's librettist.

Mephistopheles is the kingpin of the piece for the Englishman. "In our version he's a suave commentator on the foibles of life. He is like the director of the show, making all the things happen, particularly in the second act," Ashman adds.

This Faust is more than just a confrontation between the omnipotent Mr M and the hapless Faust. "It's also a triangular battle between Faust, Mephistopheles and Marguerite," Ashman explains. "There's a point at which you could say that Mephistopheles is as interested in destroying Marguerite as gaining Faust's soul. I am trying to bring forward that aggression between Mephistopheles and the innocent girl."

The cast includes Mikhail Svetlov, Anne Sophie Dupreis and Jaewoo Kim as the three main protagonists, our own Helen Medlyn as Marthe and three younger New Zealanders in smaller roles.

Ashman has appreciated such an international cast. "With a Russian Mephistopheles, a French Marguerite and a Korean Faust, it has been a very good melting pot. Everyone has enjoyed the excitement of working with people who work in different ways to themselves."

The French conductor Emmanuel Joel-Hornak is particularly welcome. "He has done Faust loads of times and most of us are Faust beginners."

Ashman has been working closely on ideas with designer John Parker, costume designer Elizabeth Whiting and lighting man Rob Peters

One concept was to set the opera in two time periods, to represent a journey.

"On one level we wanted to see the magic tricks and not rationalise them in a modern, ironic way. We wanted an element of time travelling, so we started in the late 1940s with a Faust who is in some ways like Oppenheimer who invented the atom bomb, a man who has all the world's knowledge and power but is lacking in human emotional things."

As for New Zealand, it is not the scenery, the wine or anything to do with hobbits that have caught Ashman's fancy, but the joy of finding such compatible colleagues.

"The energy and multi-tasking here is just phenomenal," he enthuses, "and it would be a good shot in the arm if we had some of that in Britain."

After Faust, Ashman will undertake two unusual productions across the Irish Sea.

One is of The Sound of Music which he explains as "a not-so-secret love of mine for some time", the other a touring version of Tristan and Isolde, timed to follow his fascinating article on six decades of Tristan recordings in last month's Gramophone magazine.

Details still have to be worked through but, even if Wagner is reduced to an orchestra of 20, no chorus, and the occasional doubling of roles "it is an Irish story and it will be able to go to places that haven't seen it before".

* Faust is at the Aotea Centre, tomorrow at 7.30pm; Oct 7, 12, 14 at 7.30pm; Oct 10 at 11.30am