FAUSTUS IN AFRICA!
The Coronet Theatre
★★★★
“Kentridge’s chalky, smudgy animations, projected onto the telegraph office’s large screen, are the production’s crowning feature”
A collaboration between William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company, Faustus In Africa! makes its debut at the ornate Coronet Theatre after a revival run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year. Integrating puppetry and Kentridge’s animation, with an imposing set modelled from a colonial telegraph studio, the South African production brings Goethe’s Faustian tale on a safari, seeing slaveowner Faustus, facilitated by the devil Mephisto, wreak havoc on man and nature alike through carelessness and desire.
Kentridge’s chalky, smudgy animations, projected onto the telegraph office’s large screen, are the production’s crowning feature: from visceral minutiae like the buzzing mosquito that becomes a hypothermic needle in Faustus’ forearm, to bleak, charcoaled scenery that drudgingly wheels round as the puppets journey through Kentridge’s created world. The animation works best when it’s in conjunction with the action onstage, whether that’s swatting flies or shooting game into a smudge of charcoal, and it’s for the most part precisely choreographed. The maps, scenery and later illustrations of pillage and decay essentially shoulder the play’s whole recontextualization, as most of its text derives from Robert David MacDonald’s direct translation of Goethe, with additional words by Lesego Rampolokeng providing rhythm and style rather than slathering contextual detail.
Designer Adrian Kohler’s puppets have craggy, impassive faces, but each becomes distinctly expressive through the puppetry directed by Kohler and Basil Jones. The principal puppets are handled by multiple cast members, allowing for more fluid and idiosyncratic movement, and the company’s standout creations are its demoniac animal characters. There’s a squawking, sinewy vulture, as well as a perfectly characterised hyena: slippery, grinning and lecherous – a wannabe Mephisto who sidles up to other characters or writhes and mewls grotesquely on the desk. Praise must be given to Jennifer Steyn, who switches flawlessly between voicing the hyena and the poised, aloof Helen of Troy, at one point flitting back and forth during a single game of checkers.
Meanwhile, Wessel Pretorius’ plotting devil Mephisto is the only non-puppet main character, a choice that could be misread as absolution for the sins of Faustus and the secondary characters, merely puppeteered by the powers that be. Rather, there is a definite sense of Mephisto’s power having its own limits as the play continues, with his sardonic, winking presence giving way to frustration, and ultimately resignation to the altogether human fallibilities that drive the puppets to excess and destruction. An insecure and existential Faustus is voiced with a very distinctive combination of tremulousness and gravitas by Atandwa Kani, and seems principally driven by lust for the play’s Margarete and Helen. In turn, each pursuit, symbolic of Faustus’ masculine, colonial entitlement, yields destruction, both intimate and with awful scale. Other destructive pursuits – the pillaging of artifacts, the ecological plundering of the landscape – are related visually by Kentridge’s animations, graphic and affecting despite their crude charcoal style.
One of the play’s sole drawbacks is that the script’s opacity and many diversions may be difficult to follow for those who are not previously familiar with Goethe’s writing and complicated plot. Kentridge’s animations do the most heavy-lifting thematically, especially when the adaptation’s script is trying to distil both Goethe’s massive, knotty text as well as lofty themes of colonial ruin and civil war. It’s true too that the play’s conclusion has more of an impact if you have prior knowledge of how it diverges from the ending of the original text. Faustus In Africa! says something stark about accountability and rehabilitation for colonialists and warmongers, but feels all the more deliberate if you have that point of reference to Faustus’ redemption as written by Goethe, or even Faustus’ damnation as written by Marlowe. In Kentridge’s tale of colonial havoc, the ‘little gods’ who Mephisto joins briefly on earth neither repent nor suffer punishment, only emerge and persist from the wreckage they’ve created.
FAUSTUS IN AFRICA!
The Coronet Theatre
Reviewed on 5th November 2025
by Emily Lipscombe
Photography by Fiona MacPherson
Previously reviewed at this venue:
DECIPHERS | ★★★★ | October 2025
NARAKU 奈落 (ABYSS) | ★★★½ | September 2025
MEDEA | ★★★★ | June 2025
EINKVAN | ★★★★★ | May 2025
PANDORA | ★★★★ | February 2025
STRANGER THAN THE MOON | ★★★ | December 2024
U-BU-SU-NA | ★★★★★ | November 2024
THE BELT | ★★★★★ | September 2024
