CHRIS THURMAN: Puppetry and avid ensemble bring Kentridge’s Faustus in Africa! back to life

I was reluctant to write about the 30th anniversary production of Faustus in Africa! that opened at the Baxter Theatre last week. My hesitation lay in the risk of seeming to perform the role of a William Kentridge praise singer. I’ve already allocated one column to Kentridge this year, and there must be a dozen others in the Business Day archives. But the show he conceived and directed in 1995 was an early postapartheid landmark, one that the SA theatre sector has lost sight of in the intervening decades, and the 2025 version merits renewed attention.

Moreover, though Kentridge’s inimitable animation is densely and delightfully allusive, connecting disparate dots across a few centuries of visual history — a crisscrossing network of literature, art, geography, philosophy, warfare, architecture, advertising and more — what sustains our interest is the deft theatricality of a committed ensemble, combined with the astonishing puppets they manipulate.

Faustus in Africa! was Kentridge’s second collaboration with Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of the Handspring Puppet Company (after the 1992 Woyzeck on the Highveld). Ubu and the Truth Commission would follow in 1997, completing a seminal trio that influenced performing arts practice in SA and, indeed, around the world.

In this production, the elements of puppetry and animation, with Kohler’s clever set design and music from Warrick Sony and James Phillips — who died in July 1995, a month after the premiere — seem initially to compete with one another, but soon merge into an immersive experience for the audience.

And then there is the text. It would be ambitious enough to stage Scottish playwright Robert David Macdonald’s modernised translation of the epic German Faust plays. The lifelong preoccupation of the polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust parts one and two are almost impossibly circuitous and arcane pieces of theatre, though Macdonald’s bold updating of Goethe’s rhyming verse goes some way to ameliorating this for contemporary English audiences.

Faustus in Africa! goes further, extracting and adapting a core narrative before embedding it in the colonial past and adding a few postcolonial twists. In brief: God and the demon Mephistopheles make a wager over the soul of Faustus, described as an “explorer, cartographer, merchant, scholar, missionary and slaver”. Faustus, then, is a one-man incarnation of the hypocrisy and arrogance of the European colonial project. When Mephisto and Faustus make an additional bet, in which the latter’s “enlightenment” and “idealism” are corrupted — the desire for knowledge quickly perverted into lust, greed and cruelty — all hell is unleashed on Africa’s people and ecology.

The play resists neat analogy, however, through well-chosen anachronistic quirks and inversions of the Faustian myth. When we meet Faustus, for instance, he is already an old man; a washed-up colonial relic, obscure and cynical. Given the opportunity to (re)join the violence and plunder, he accepts with priapic enthusiasm, eventually becoming caught up in the postcolonial African cliché of liberator-tyrants (just like Goethe’s Faust who, with the help of Mephistopheles, wins an emperor’s favour by fabricating money and military assistance).

Faustus in Africa! takes a final, local turn. The dictator is supplanted by a new leader — Faustus’ much-abused former servant, Johnston. But Johnston is not interested in revenge. Instead, Madiba-like, he declares “a general amnesty”, allowing “every villain” to be “part of the resolution”: “Faustus, my one-time master, / I need you here to plaster / Over the cracks in my new empire”. Here, in one of Lesego Rampolokeng’s additions to the base text, is a satirical but not unfair summary of white South Africans’ position circa 1995.

This Faustus does not receive the full redemption imagined by Goethe, but it is a form of absolution nonetheless. Significantly (and subverting the “God’s rainbow nation” rhetoric of the 1990s, there is no final divine intervention. God’s voice is unplugged from the telephone exchange. Mephisto expresses a less lofty, “earthbound”, secular vision: “I prefer the duplicity here / where there’s good grace, humour too, / and who knows what will come out of it.”

That remains a useful provocation in 2025, though one may be cautious of extending too much sympathy to Faustus and his devilish enablers.

• ‘Faustus in Africa!’ is at the Baxter Theatre until March 22.

This column originally appeared in Business Day.