★★★★

“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.

NARAKU

The Coronet Theatre

★★★½

“a beautiful if slightly distant performance”

Naraku, Japanese for ‘Abyss’, opens with a visceral atmospheric statement and pretty much stays with it from there on in. Brought to us by Dance Company Lasta, it entrances and unnerves with equal intensity. We enter the auditorium to a man with a stunning hair / beard combo (not dramatically relevant but thought you ought to know) sat determinedly at his desk, backstage centre. He is immovable, striking. Then the first blackout comes, and the ballet commences. I won’t run through each sequence and performance in turn, partly because that would make for an arduous read, but also because the play itself functions so much as a whole, each actor (bar perhaps the protagonist) morphing from villain to victim to unnerving tertiary spirit with liquid ease.

And indeed liquid is perhaps an apt adjective for the performance as a whole. The primary strength of Naraku, amongst many, is its staggering physical beauty; choreographed by Yoshimitsu Kushida. Each of the dancers move with such grace and yet such power and raw humanity. I have found that ballets which reduce to a collection of delicate white swans prancing without a care in the world can sometimes lose an audience, and Naraku seems to know this (as any production titled ‘The Abyss’ presumably would), opting instead to stretch the body to impossible, primal limits. Performers crawl across the stage like malevolent spiders, pursue with cruel brutishness, stalk, scream, flail frenetically as if they’re drowning. They are vulnerable, but more importantly, powerful, which extends to their facial acting. It’s tempting in movement pieces to let the body do the talking, and whilst the actors certainly communicate through their manipulated physicality, they don’t let their expression go by the wayside; rather, they contort their faces into almost grotesque pictures, capturing the spectrum and extent of human emotion, passion and pain with ease.

The play’s protagonist (the man descending into this peculiar abyss), played beautifully by Satoshi Nakagawa, is perhaps the best illustration of this acting ability. In various sequences, he fights for a scorned lover against a brutish opponent with completely believable desperation, then receives an intense but pleasurable massage from said opponent, before returning to crushing grief which shrinks him within himself, screaming, laughing hysterically, only to then burst out from this misery in an impassioned call for redemption. All the performers are superb throughout, and are the primary reason for the play’s beauty.

However, this is not to negate the technical facets of the performance. The lighting is used with palpable intention and executed with acute precision. Every facet of the minimalist set design (two chairs and an ornate desk) are considered in each palette; sharp red gels reflect of the tips of chairs to create almost satanic horns, a soft orange wash flattens everything into a pleasurable simplicity. Tension and release and dictated just as much by the lighting as anything else, including the sound. The soundtracks sometimes veer slightly into the melodramatic, but largely are very atmospheric and tasteful. Indeed, the most impressive facet of the show’s sound design is its purposeful absence; at the business end of certain sequences, the brooding strings and piano chords fade out, so all we can hear is the slapping of flesh and rasping breaths. This is notable in climactic moments such as the aforementioned desk man’s eventual movement and subsequent abuse at the hand of (the character of) Mana Tazaki. She is the only speaking actress in the piece, and she questions and berates the protagonist(s) (if we’re to take them as iterations of each other) with undeniable flair.

My main gripe with the piece, however, is that, for all this beauty, I didn’t feel emotionally invested or really engaged at anything more than an aesthetic level. The titular abyss never really feels explored. The depths aren’t sunk to, at least not in such a way that makes any redemption feel cathartic. There’s no tangible emotional arc beyond the immediate concept – or at least not one I could discern – and the piece suffers as a result. Its short-ish running time of 80 minutes is necessary; had it gone on any longer, the lack of narrative stakes and audience empathy would have been a more pressing issue. As it is, however, it makes for a beautiful if slightly distant performance, filled with enough evocative images (such as an eerie two-headed monster created by two of the female presenting dancers) to keep you entranced.

Naraku is conceived and executed stunningly, and if abstract movement pieces exploring the depths of the human psyche are your bag, then I can’t recommend it enough.

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”

FAUSTUS IN AFRICA!

The Coronet Theatre

Reviewed on 5th November 2025

by Emily Lipscombe

Photography by Fiona MacPherson

Previously reviewed at this venue:

FAUSTUS

FAUSTUS

FAUSTUS

NARAKU

The Coronet Theatre

★★★½

“a beautiful if slightly distant performance”

NARAKU

The Coronet Theatre

Reviewed on 19th September 2025

by Horatio Holloway

Previously reviewed at this venue:

NARAKU

NARAKU

NARAKU

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