There was a moment in his life when William Kentridge, the renowned Joburg-based polymathartist, reckoned he might abandon his artistic ambitions and switch to banking. Clues as to how that career change might have impacted his soul are embedded in one of his early theatre productions, Faustus in Africa!
The play, a 1995 multi-media adaptation of Goethe’s take on the tale of a man who makes a pact with the devil, has as its setting a banking-like backroom or countinghouse, perhaps the headquarters of some colonial empire: ledgers on shelves, desks for studying accounts, contracts signed in blood.
It’s within this vision of number-crunching eternal damnation that Faustus, in puppet form, makes a deal with the oily Mephisto: his soul in return for unrestricted access to Africa, a chance to take from it whatever his heart desires. It’s also where the play’s action unfolds, using Kentridge’s charcoal animations to transport both cast and audience on a wild, hedonistic safari across the continent.
Kentridge’s so-called ‘stone-age animations’ are laboriously produced by filming the bit-by-bit development of his charcoal drawings (draw a little, take a picture, draw some more, take a picture, rub out a bit, take a picture, and so on). They are also an essential part of the fabric and the material substance of Faustus in Africa!, part of what gives it a certain timelessness.
A consummate collaborator, Kentridge relishes working with other artists, whether composers, opera singers, dancers, actors or designers. To create Faustus, he teamed up with puppetry innovators Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, the duo behind Handspring Puppet Company, who created more than 20 puppets for the show, including an adorable, yet cunning and cruel hyena.
Kentridge first co-opted the Cape Town-based puppet masters in 1992 to collaborate on what became their take on Büchner with Woyzeck on the Highveld, which toured Europe. Following its success, they used Goethe’s reworking of the Faust legend as a springboard from which to unleash a kind of zany, elegiac comedy about the colonial and postcolonial conquest of Africa. In 1995, it was part of an early wave of post-apartheid theatre searching for newness. In a note in the programme of the National Arts Festival, its South African premiere, Kentridge wrote that it had ‘the aim of finding the place where the play ceases to be a daunting other – the weight of Europe leaning on the southern tip of Africa – and becomes our own work’.
Visually inventive, the play traversed different mediums and performance genres; its offbeat storytelling achieved by layering charcoal animations, puppets, actors, music (by Warrick Sony and the late James Phillips) and somewhat unbridled imagination. It was all channeled into a vibrant concoction that looked and felt like something greater than the sum of its parts. With it, Kentridge was able to express his passion for art with ‘bastard origins’ – work that comes, he says, ‘not out of a clarity of thought, but out of a mixture of things’.
It was a great success and, like Woyzeck, toured internationally; The Washington Post called it ‘utterly engrossing’.
Three decades later, the show is back. Lara Foot, as associate director, has driven a reworked revival, uniting Kentridge, Kohler and Jones with a new cast, technological enhancements, and a fresh focus.
‘We haven’t altered the images that are projected at all,’ says Kentridge. ‘The text remains the same, the puppets are dusted off but essentially untransformed. But in these 30 years, the world has rotated. Though the production is the same, it is seen from a new angle. Things that were peripheral to the first production – the question of ownership and repatriation of African artworks, greed and corruption in the new South African state – now take a more prominent position. But the central questions of the weight of Europe on Africa has not fundamentally changed.’
While it continues to confront colonialism, greed and excess, what’s newly apparent is its referencing of the climate emergency as a consequence of unchecked capitalism. In an age when Faustian deals are rife – in politics and business – the production feels as relevant as ever.
There have been some updates, though. The original film footage underwent digital restoration, new puppets and special effects were added and all scenes rigorously interrogated with a new cast. Foot replotted the action, edited it down in order to allow some filmed sequences to run simultaneously with the live stage action, and freed the puppets from some traditional limitations.
Foot, who is CEO and artistic director of The Baxter in Cape Town and who is as business-minded as she is a hands-on creative force, has a reputation for toughness, for fighting back against criticism, and for defending against the crackdown on the arts. She’s been determined in her efforts to show the world that South African theatre still matters, doing so by consistently championing high-stakes productions capable of attracting not only foreign funding, but international audiences.
Sometimes these shows premier in Europe, as with 2022’s Othello, which attracted German donors that enabled her to assemble a formidable creative team. Her stage adaptation of JM Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, another collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, toured Europe, the US and China.
And thus it is with Faustus in Africa!, for which Foot secured not only international funding, but at least three overseas tours following its Baxter debut. The first covered multiple theatres and festivals across continental Europe, and in August it played at the Edinburgh International Festival, followed by a week in Paris for Festival d’Automne. In November, it returns to the UK for a two-week season at London’s Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill.
This is no small achievement.
Faustus is an expensive production, prohibitively so in South Africa, where theatre pricing means box-office receipts can barely cover the cost of putting on large-scale works. It is also a generous show, with a lot happening on stage within the confines of 100 minutes.
Though rooted in highbrow verse and lofty speeches, its theatricality lies in the interplay of multiple creative components: puppets that come alive in exhilarating ways; top-calibre actors who seamlessly switch between roles and effortlessly segue into stints as puppeteers; and the many ways in which the screen onto which Kentridge’s drawings are projected becomes a kind of transdimensional portal linking the physical world of the stage with an animated realm made manifest through charcoal and sepia. It is, in other words, a tremendous act of collaboration.
And its existence is living proof that South Africa’s creative pundits have something the world craves.
