Werner Schwab

It opens with a well-known tableau: Werner Schwab’s Faust also muses in his study. But in this scene, he gives new meaning to “Two souls dwell in my breast”: you need two souls so that self love has both a sender and an addressee.
Schwab’s variant is a version of the powerful stuff of Nietzsche. God has shot himself, Mephisto is sure of it. The collected knowledge of scholarship right up to the 20th century, including defeatism and nihilism, all resonate. Just like modernism: Margarethe stands in a phone booth. Schwab plays with motifs from Goethe’s Faust and he imbues them with everything you would expect of Schwab: a battery of swear words, brutal sexuality, faeces, and the characters’ fatal opportunism. His version is at the same time no less a celebration of language, if, of course, an excessive language. Those who use it deform it, not least as a replica of a world that is itself deformed. Philosophy appears as a quagmire through which one must wade and in which one sinks.
Old age, already a theme in Goethe, is met not only by Faust. Mephisto and Margarethe are the new murderous dream couple. Margarethe has grown up and grown away from the gentle image of Gretchen. Geriatrics is the starting point and destination of this Faust.
“Oh yes, the old questions of life’s yoghurt, from whence the milk of existence flows.” (Wagner)