“An ambitious exploration of the psychological confusion, chaos, and bile that take root in colonialism’s heart of darkness.”
After its premiere nearly thirty years ago, Handspring Puppet Company (War Horse, Little Amal) teams up with renowned artist and animator William Kentridge to remount a visually stunning reboot of Doctor Faustus.
In another triumph of form meeting function, one walks away from Faustus in Africa! wondering what else but puppetry and a restrung Elizabethan tragedy could have told this harrowing tale of colonialism, empire, and slavery. In this version, Faustus is a white South African (and a puppet) whose desire to live his life to the fullest leads him down a dark and winding safari of greed, corruption, and violence. The devil Mephistopheles, to whom Faustus has sold his soul in exchange for knowledge and power, is portrayed in human form by Wessel Pretorius – an ominous storytelling choice, given that all the other characters are puppets. The imagination does not have to go far in drawing a line between a human and the Devil himself.
Combined with Handspring’s puppetry excellence and music by James Phillips & Warrick Sony, Kentridge’s animations simultaneously offer an aesthetically extraordinary treat and a horrifying creative representation of colonial violence. His erased charcoal animations effectively drive the story across the African continent. Images that often seem non-linear, random, and dreamlike lend this ambitious production the psychological underpinnings of confusion, chaos, and bile that take root in colonialism’s heart of darkness. In one animation, the typebar of a typewriter annihilates an elephant. In another, lines become bodies crammed in a slave ship. In a testament to the power of art to tell stories as dark as this one, Kentridge’s violent smudges subconsciously prime the audience to imagine a project as sickly as colonialism.
In retrospect, the scene that has stuck with me is oddly one of the first – when Faustus almost commits suicide. He believes that he has already achieved all there is to achieve, learned all there is to learn from his small human existence. He has somehow wound himself up to believe that there is nothing more for him to do on earth, no meaning left for him to discover. His solution to this problem is a colonial rampage through the African continent and a rape of the earth so brutal, it is almost too difficult to watch in the form of stylized, black and white animations. Viewed from this angle, it is not difficult to make the narrative leap from the 16th century German tale of a doctor who sells his soul for power to our society’s ongoing deal with the devil of colonialism. Faustus in Africa! raises deeply disturbing questions about human nature, capitalism, and the lengths to which we’ve gone (and continue to go) to quench a thirst for meaning
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Faustus in Africa was a part of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival and played until 23 August. Get tickets here: http://www.eif.co.uk/events/faustus-in-africa