How to build heaven on stage

The theatre reform of Georg Fuchs in the staging of Goethe’s "Faust"

Abstract

In May 1908 the Künstlertheater in Munich first opened its doors to the public. The new theatre had just been built according to the structural ideas of the German publicist and theatre theorist Georg Fuchs (1868-1949) and the first play to be represented on the new stage – Goethe’s Faust – had been chosen by the dramatist in order to represent the profound reform he wished for the theatre (later summarized in his famous Revolution in the Theatre). Thanks to the critiques of the time and Fuchs’s own writings, it is possible to partly reconstruct the staging of the play, and to gain a privileged insight into the practical transposition of Fuchs’s theatre reform, as well as into a time in which theatre seems to be on the brink of a profound renewal while being yet strongly attached to its recent past.