“Doktormutter Faust”, Trier, Germany

Dana Rufolo in Germany
4 January 2025

Fatma Aydemir’s play Doktormutter Faust (“Doctoral supervisor Faust”) is a contemporary rendition of Goethe’s Faust which sets the drama in a university and focuses on feminism. The Theater Trier production premiered in December 2024 and is directed by Ingrid Gündisch. The world premiere was in Essen, Bremen, Germany in September 2023, and Suhrkamp Verlag published the play in 2024.

Giovanni Rupp as Mephisto.
Photo credit: Sylvain Guillot.

Theater Trier didn’t use its main stage to present Doktormutter Faust but rather placed the production inside the primitive setting of the main hall of the Europäische Kunstakademie (European Art Academy) – a roughly rectangular space abounding in concrete flooring and awkwardly placed pillars that wreak havoc on sightlines. As compensation, the actors often performed on the top surface of two large boxes which separate into sets of stairs that also provide height, permitting the audience on opposite sides of the performance area to adequately see the actors. This roughhewn stage setting obliges a discursive, somewhat static production, but interestingly this becomes a style (not infrequently used in Germany and Austria, especially for plays by Elfriede Jelinek) rather than a deficiency – for Doktormutter Faust is largely about ideas, its intrinsic playfulness deriving from how closely Aydemir echoes the over 200-year-old Faust which most Germans know practically by heart while bending it to contemporary concerns.

It is above all the sardonic and chuckling Mephisto, played by Giovanni Rupp, who provides movement and dynamism. He sweeps open his cloak in grandiose gestures reminiscent of a buccaneer and struts boldly around the space in high-heeled shoes, proclaiming his point of view with confidence. The duo of secondary characters (Jana Auburger and Joana Tscheinig) who play playwright and dramaturge in a prologue scene, teenagers slurping their beer in the equivalent of the scene from Goethe’s Faust called Auerbachs Keller (“Auerbach’s Tavern”), and the witches of Walpurgisnacht who support Mephisto’s introduction of magic into the otherwise rational storyline, provide dramatic contrast and unequivocally hook the play back to the original Faust.

Giovanni Rupp, Florian Voigt and Barbara Ullmann.
Photo credit: Sylvain Guillot.

In brief, Professor Margarete Faust, the “Doktormutter” of the title who is a respected and even famous professor of gender studies, learns that her job is under threat by right-wing university administrators who consider a department of gender studies to be unnecessary and by a press outraged to learn she facilitated a student’s abortion. The professor is played with steady calm and clarity by Barbara Ullmann. The good-looking student with whom, under Mephisto’s influence, she falls in love at first sight (Shakespearian themes here), Karim (Florian Voigt), has come to ask to write his doctoral dissertation with her. Professor Faust agrees, but she makes a Faustian bargain with Karim as his “Doktormutter”. He is to fulfil her amorous and sexual fantasies. She invites him to journey to Paris with her and eventually undresses (modestly, only partially) before him. He is a loner who seems to have had the most intense emotional relationship to date with his mother, and in a switch of figureheads from Goethe to Freud that comes across as a bit odd and out of place, Margarete Faust tells him to call her “mother”).

Karim has limited romantic or sexual interest in Professor Faust, not only because he is half her age – at least in this production – but also because he is gay. However, as an immigrant who needs to be enrolled to retain his German residence permit, he yields to her desires. Unlike Goethe’s character Gretchen who goes insane and is imprisoned for infanticide after Faust seduces her, Karim goes to the police to complain he has been the victim of a reprehensible sexual power game, and as a consequence Professor Faust is imprisoned.

Joana Tscheinig, Barbara Ullmann and Jana Auburger.
Photo credit: Sylvain Guillot.

Fluidity of identity is perhaps the most original theme in Doktormutter Faust. The name Margarete Faust combines seduced with seducer (Gretchen’s Christian name is Margarete). She is a female who uses her authority and power to abuse a male in a reversal of usual gender stereotypes. Childbearing anxiety is spread among all the female characters, with personal stories of abortion discussed by each of them. Valeria, a female graduate student of Professor Faust (played by Jana Auburger) is the only one who decides to become a mother, and that only because she is helped by Karim who consents to act as the father to create a small family. Who and what is evil is ambiguous, and the morally bad and the good are inverted. Mephisto leaves in a puff of smoke without getting any payback from Professor Faust, for instance. Giving fluidity a philosophic context, Valeria recites the words of the playwright: “Mein Körper ist ein Text. Seine Oberfläche ist aus Papier, auf ihm schreiben sich alle Diskurse nieder, die mich, die meinen Körper erst hervorbringen.” (“My body is a text. Its surface is made of paper, and all the discourses that create me and my body are written on it.”)

Fatma Aydemir’s declared motivation to slavishly echo the original Faust has the drawback of limiting the richness of Professor Margarete Faust’s character and under-explaining the script. My present description is much more precise than the dialogue itself, which stays at the level of hints and implications rather than outright declarations (with the exception of Valeria claiming she will organize a protest against Professor Faust’s expulsion from the university). Professor Faust’s devotion to her academic institution and to her brilliant gender study research have made her an academic star. But she is middle-aged now and is sorely conscious of having missed out on having a private family life. She uses the magic of Mephisto to venture, too late, into the arena of affection and love, but this solution is concocted. The anguish that Margarete Faust feels at the prospect of being fired as a professor would be overwhelming for such a person. But, because Aydemir’s stated goal was to adhere to the outlines of Goethe’s Faust, Professor Faust’s emotional intensity has been artificially curtailed.

Restraints are put on the other actors as well. The storyline itself would have been more compelling if untethered from Goethe. And as a fresh performance, the actors might have indulged more in physical theatre. However, as a new play that is buried in the German landscape and has little chance of interesting non-Germanic audiences, it was a surprise New Year’s gift to have seen it.