Gretchen rettet Faust

The premise is the joke and the joke holds for a whole evening: Faust is on the programme, but the performers playing Faust, Mephisto and Gretchen have not appeared. So the prompter comes out of her box and does it — a solo, all the parts, with the story tilted towards the girl whose name is in the title and who, in the original, is given rather less say than the men. The house calls it a fulminant theatre solo, and the joke lands more on what happens when a show falls apart than on Goethe. Sabine Kus plays everyone. It is also the New Year's Eve early show.