Witkacy and Ghelderode: Goethe’s Faust Transformed into a Grotesque Cabaret

The farce, realistic and surrealistic, trivial and yet transfigured, is an essential expression of both Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s The Beelzebub Sonata and Michel de Ghelderode’s The Tragic Death of Doctor Faustus. Both plays were written in 1925, and the subtitle of each play informs that we are at a great distance from Goethe’s transcendent drama, for Ghelderode’s play is subtitled “ATragedy for the Music Hall” and Witkacy’s “What Really Happened in Mordovar.” This paper explores the deformation of any traces of Goethe’s tragic Faust, as each playwright situates his play in a grotesque cabaret. In both plays the Mephistophelian character has been deprived of his powers of negation, and instead as Diamotoruscant in Ghelderode’s version produces cheap tricks akin to those of Goethe’s “Witches Kitchen” in the music hall. Not only do both playwrights ridicule the potential of a twentieth-century Faust figure, but they also mock Naturalism in the theater and in Witkacy’s play even the possibility of a Theatre of Pure Form.