Faustus in Africa! at Royal Lyceum Theatre and London – Edinburgh International Festival review

The Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa changed British theatre when their collaboration on War Horse turned the equine hero of Philip Pullman’s novel into a stage superstar.

Founded by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, the company’s work on home-grown shows such as The Life and Times of Michael K and Ubu and the Truth Commission has been equally striking. Both have been seen in Edinburgh, with the International Festival now hosting Faustus in Africa!, first seen in 1995 and on a 30^th anniversary tour.

It’s a striking piece, taking Goethe’s original morality tale about a man who sells his soul to the devil for power, pleasure and profit and turning it into a story about the heavy hand of colonialism on Africa. Its director, designer and animator William Kentridge points out in his programme note that although the specific circumstances of the continent have altered since the production premiered: “the central questions of the weight of Europe have not fundamentally changed.”

This great artist’s animations, heavy charcoal drawings forming and being erased, maps that place the action and reveal its despoilation – animals shot, artworks plundered, boundaries severed – power the action, shown on a screen behind a set (designed by Kohler) that looks like a dusty office, full of directories and guides, with banked rows of desks.

In between these islands of bureaucracy and knowledge, Mephistopheles in the shape of a suavely manipulative Wessel Pretorius makes a bet with God (shown as a cartoon megaphone and voiced by a woman) that he can corrupt Faust “explorer, cartographer, merchant, scholar, missionary slaver.”

Faust, like all the other characters, is a wooden puppet, carved with severe lines in his face to resemble the 19^th-century explorer Pietro Paolo Savaorgnan di Brazzà, who gave his name to Brazzaville on the Congo. Brilliantly voiced and controlled by Atandwa Kani, he is both bored and rapacious, quickly enticed into an endless journey of excess, of corruption, and greed.

As Faust embarks on his frenzy of exploitation, seducing the innocent with riches, fighting duels, other puppets – tyrants, politicians, a glamorous Helen, a beautiful young woman – make their appearance in fragmentary scenes.

The translation by Robert David MacDonald, with additional text by Lesego Rampolokeng, is both poetic and a bit ponderous. As image piles upon image, it is not always clear exactly what is going on or precisely the point being made. The overall picture – the sense of waste, of goodness being thrown aside – is conveyed with a kind of fury, but the specifics of the overthrow of rulers and their replacement by others are opaque.

The ending is a surprise, too, pulling the play suddenly up short. For all its compelling fury and the seriousness of its themes, Faustus in Africa! feels slightly less than the sum of its very considerable parts.