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Faustus: That Damned Woman review – devilish drama is far from divine

Lyric Hammersmith, London
Chris Bush’s female Faustus is original, ambitious and fantastically revisionist – but this bare-boned production fails to save its soul

Doctor Faustus, as we know him from folk legend, is a doomed overreacher whose quest for worldly power earns him eternal damnation in his pact with the devil. Chris Bush’s antihero is a very different creation: Johanna Faustus is an earnest 17th-century working woman whose mother has been hanged for witchcraft. Bush, who has previously contemporised the medieval mystery plays, refashions the Faustus myth with promising inversions beyond the gender switch.

Where the Faustus of Goethe and Marlowe’s plays is led to the devil by hubris and ambition, Johanna is a principled renegade who wants to use her diabolical powers altruistically. “I shall do good,” she says as she seals the deal with Lucifer.

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