The devil dreams in charcoal: In Faustus in Africa!, puppets plunder humanity’s soul

Atandwa Kani (who voices Faustus), Eben Genis and Wessel Pretorius (Mephisto) in a scene from Faustus in Africa! Photo: Fiona MacPherson

By Keith Bain

10 Mar 2025

Forget Goethe, never mind Marlowe: this revival and reworking of the 1995 production of ‘Faustus in Africa!’ is from another dimension. It features live actors, charcoal animations and astonishing puppetry. Helmed by directors William Kentridge and Lara Foot, it’s a wondrous team effort, an astonishing theatrical event that avoids portentousness, yet sparkles with polish, professionalism, and top-notch production values. And is deeply, darkly funny.

In July 2019, in a voice note, William Kentridge told me about one of his guilty pleasures: when he has the opportunity, he likes to have a Sunday afternoon snooze while watching the Formula One Grand Prix.

“It’s so fantastic,” he said, “because you know nothing much is going to happen and the best thing is that the soundtrack snores for you. It’s like the canned laughter in comedy shows — Formula One has the snoring of your afternoon sleep built in.”

This unexpected revelation was more than evidence that Kentridge the Artist is also Kentridge the Human Being, though. His slightly self-deprecating quip was also a clue to his dry, droll sense of humour. It’s frequently at the heart of his work, and yet so often overlooked, or ignored. Problem is, Kentridge is taken so seriously by the art world that his desire to make us laugh gets sidelined, lost behind the sober, somber, often fiercely intellectual unpacking of his work.

Like me, Kentridge believes his work is funny, yet he says he can’t figure out if — or when — audiences “get” his humour.

“I keep thinking I’m making comedies, and people tell me, ‘No! Your animated films are gloomy!’” he says. “And at other times I think I’m being serious and people find it funny. So I’ve given up trying to predict if works are humorous or not.”

Buhle Stefane, Asanda Rilityana, Mongi Mthombeni, Jennifer Steyn and Wessel Pretorius in Faustus in Africa! (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

Perhaps you need genuine darkness and a few devils and demons to make the comedy really pop. That’s certainly the way it is with Faustus in Africa!, a multimedia theatrical experience that Kentridge fashioned with Handspring Puppet Company’s Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, as well as other collaborators, some 30 years ago.

It was the dawn of democracy for South Africa, and this team of artists 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.

Within a dizzying framework of layered and multivalent storytelling, it conveyed a ceaselessly fascinating snapshot of rapacious continent-wide raping and pillaging and wide-scale exploitation that’s continued over centuries. Despite this potentially harrowing narrative, an altogether otherworldly energy prevailed, a cartoonish dimension that deftly conflated mythology and history, present-day fears and alarm bells for the future.

As socio-political satire, it was potent and powerful, but it was also just as deliriously irreverent as the idea of an iconic artist napping to the snore-soundtrack of the Sunday Grand Prix.

More significant than the narrative substance and subversiveness of the production, though, was the fact of the show as something visionary and inventive, its complex layering of charcoal animations, puppets, actors, music (by Warrick Sony and the late James Phillips) and unbridled imagination channeled into a vibrant concoction that was both thrillingly new and so much more than the sum of its parts.

In 1995, it was part of an early wave of post-apartheid theatre searching for newness. Kentridge in a note in the programme of the National Arts Festival, where it had its South African premiere, 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”.

It was also a chance for audiences to experience wonder, to be transported, to transcend.

Asanda Rilityana, Buhle Stefane, Jennifer Steyn and Mongi Mthombeni-Mongiwekhaya in Faustus in Africa! (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

Three decades later, in a reworked revival that’s now playing at the Baxter’s Flipside Theatre in Cape Town, it continues to look and feel and sound like its own, unique thing, some kind of special magic conjured from the robust collaborative spirit of artists intentionally creating something original out of the decay and leavings of the past.

Faustus in Africa! is a generous production.

There is a lot happening on stage, a vast wealth of imagination and action within the confines of 100 minutes. As much as it is rooted in highbrow verse, its speeches spoken with eloquent gravitas, there is the sheer gorgeousness of what’s happening visually: puppets that come alive in exhilarating ways; actors seamlessly switching between roles or effortlessly segueing into stints as puppet handlers; and the many ways in which the screen on to which Kentridge’s drawings are projected becomes a kind of interdimensional portal linking the physical world of the stage with a realm of the imagination made manifest through animated charcoal and sepia.

The show is a wild ride.

Visceral and propulsive, its creators understand the power of movement, the energy generated by arranging and reorganising bodies in space, the thrill of witnessing a puppet hyena pounce in slow motion across the stage, or the miracle of having a charcoal megaphone become God with the addition of a single disembodied voice. There’s magic everywhere, whether in the way a jazzy band of puppet musicians marches across the stage, instruments in full swing, or how a paper-shuffling office worker (actress Jennifer Steyn) performs little signature balletic gestures as she moves on and off stage, transforming the simple act of walking into a glimmering performance.

Meaning is, in many ways, left to the audience’s capacity to make connections between the inexhaustible supply of images and ideas presented. There’s nothing didactic, no polemic, no authoritarian message. The narrative is potholed and vague, ripe for discovery.

There was a moment in his life when Kentridge almost gave up his ambition of working in the arts and considered an alternative career in banking. There’s some semblance of what that might have meant in Faustus in Africa!, which has as its fixed set a kind of admin office, a countinghouse, perhaps headquarters of some colonial empire: ledgers on shelves, desks for studying accounts, contracts signed in blood.

Mongi Mthombeni-Mongiwekhaya and Asanda Rilityana in Faustus in Africa! (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

Mongi Mthombeni in a scene from Faustus in Africa! (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

Atandwa Kani and Eben Genis in a poignant scene from Faustus in Africa! (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

Atandwa Kani and Eben Genis operating the Faustus puppet in Faustus in Africa! (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

Atandwa Kani (who voices Faustus), Eben Genis and Wessel Pretorius (Mephisto) in a scene from Faustus in Africa! (Photo: Fiona MacPherson)

For some, it’s the very epitome of a possible hell. And although Kentridge was probably not reflecting on his own near miss with the wrong career choice when he directed the show 30 years ago, it’s certainly fun to make the connection, to see this banking backroom as a vision of where Kentridge might have inadvertently consigned himself to a life of number-crunching eternal damnation.

It’s within this rather banal vision of hell that Faustus makes a deal with the repugnant and shifty Mephisto — his soul in return for unsurpassed access to Africa, a chance to make of it whatever his heart desires. What ensues is an ambitious conquest of the continent, his devilish contractor aiding and abetting him and, when necessary (literally), ripping the heads off anyone who gets in his way.

It’s telling that the show’s most irresistibly charming and entertaining characters are its devils. Revelling in his role as the sinister Mephisto, Wessel Pretorius, a lone human-cast character in a world of puppets, is all shifty eyes and sly cunning, his comically malevolent grin steeped in oily evil, his puckered lips annunciating every syllable with the suspect charm of a genetically untrustworthy politician.

Aside from Mephisto, there’s his emissary-on-Earth, incarnated as a hyena full of deeply wired cunning and cruelty, and yet brought to life as a ridiculously adorable puppet. Observing this malevolent creature engage with the world, brought to life by its puppet handlers and voiced with an undertone of sweet irony by a captivating Steyn, is pure joy.

In contrast with these mercurial tricksters, there’s the resonant voice of Atandwa Kani as a gin-swilling puppet Faustus who has contracted himself into a corner but nevertheless heads off on a safari-like campaign of self-interest and cannibalistic capitalism. Rendered as an almost forlorn, slightly emaciated puppet, Faustus is, despite a sizeable intellect, too slow of wit to predict how the terms of his unholy contract might harm the world — or damage his own reputation as it echoes through time.

If that sounds familiar, then it’s because this reworked Faustus in Africa! has arrived in an era rife with devils in human meat suits signing deals whose repercussions will echo through history. Ours is a time when squeezing others for a few drops of blood before sucking them dry is the prevailing pastime among the power hungry.

But, if the realpolitik of our present moment is evidence of the failure of global leaders to learn from the past, this production also hints at the solution.

To fix the world, we do not need the unholy tricks and false promises and contracts signed in the blood of the powerless: what we need is more imagination and greater collaboration. This show is a physical manifestation of the capacity we humans possess to use our creativity to wondrous ends — and to never stop interrogating the faults in history so that we might envision a more extraordinary future.

Not that you should go and see Faustus in Africa! looking for answers. Go to satisfy a guilty pleasure. The rewards will be great. DM

Faustus in Africa! is playing at the Baxter Flipside Theatre until 22 March. Tickets available from Webtickets.

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