Faustus in Africa!

The impulse to revisit a piece made 30 years ago has been growing for several years.

Faustus in Africa!, the second piece created by William Kentridge with Handspring Puppet Company, had been an exciting opportunity to build on the experiments of Woyzeck on the Highveld, our initial partnership from ‘92.

With Woyzeck, Kentridge’s hand-drawn, ‘stone age’ charcoal animations had conveniently utilised the ability of film to instantly shift stage locations, but the more important discovery, was the screen’s ability to reveal the hidden thoughts of a character whose static face was made of wood.

With Faustus in Africa!, the screen scape became significantly more ambitious. So too the more than 20 puppets, and especially the music. In the years leading up to the unbanning of the ANC in 1989, James Philips—now deceased—became an icon of resistance music amongst Afrikaner youth. With Faustus in Africa!, he and Warrick Sony were able to turn their music in a theatrical direction, composing a magnificent soundscape of irony and wistful longing.

During the 1990s Faustus in Africa! had been a joy for the Handspring puppeteers to perform, touring widely across Europe and the USA. Over the intervening years we had often dreamt of a revival, but the piece had so many elements that seemed to have floated apart over time: script, puppets, video, props, sets, costumes. There was no video recording, just a bald script.

Then, in 2021, Handspring Puppet Company began a collaboration with Lara Foot, writer, award-winning Director and Artistic Director of Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre. Her adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K with Handspring provoked a burgeoning fascination with the puppet.

Together we were looking for a new collaboration. As we are living through a time when pacts with the Devil are going down all over the globe it seemed a good season to call Faustus back to our stages.

However, for 30 years everything had been in storage, and there, in a box we discovered the stage managers prompt script! All the links and notes about the action. The film footage was located in Johannesburg and sent for digital restoration. In Warrick’s archive he found all the original music.

In February 2025 a whole new generation of actors gathered in Cape Town to hear William explain his original adaptation of Goethe’s mammoth opus and how the animation commented on and illuminated the text.

Then Lara began plotting the action, often breaking out from the restrictions that the puppet playboards traditionally demanded. She edited 30 minutes of the text and allowed some filmed sequences to run simultaneously with stage action.         New puppets and special effects were added, all scenes rigorously interrogated with the cast.

One scene in particular—the auction of Faustus’ African art collection—provoked anguished debate. Some of the sculpted heads on the auctioneer’s block have eyes that move. Clearly, they are sculptures but are also alive before being ruthlessly smashed under the auctioneer’s hammer as the price rockets. A powerful metaphor for the crushing of a continent made more grizzly by the relentlessly jolly ragtime soundtrack. Should we change the music? Should we keep the scene?

During our tech week, William returned to polish the piece and in fact, changed very little. The new Faustus in Africa! with its auction intact, is now off on its way with his blessing.

• Basil Jones and Adrian Kolher, Handspring Puppet Company, April 2025

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Note from William Kentridge

Faustus in Africa! was produced at the time of and in response to the negotiated settlement between the outgoing nationalist government South Africa and the incoming African National Congress (ANC) government.

What were the ethical cots of this agreement, in which there was a clear choice of peace over justice?

We have not changed the images that are projected at all. The text remains the same. The puppets are dusted off but essentially untransformed. Over thirty years, the arms of the original performers have grown tired and we have younger, stronger arms doing the puppeteering and acting.

But in these thirty years, South Africa and to an extent the world itself has rotated.

Even 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.

The work is always a combination of the piece itself, that comes towards the audience and the associations and insights that an audience brings to what they see. These associations and understandings shift over time. The words that come from the stage to the audience are heard and seen anew.

• William Kentridge, April 2025