Skip to main content

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.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2RBXaU4
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Degrees of separation: what connects Seinfeld to Steve Bannon?

From the US sitcom to the far-right rabble rouser, we go down the rabbit hole, thanks to the arrival of Jerry’s show on Netflix Seinfeld All 180 episodes of the 90s’ most misanthropic sitcom have arrived on Netflix, but not everyone is happy. Some viewers have complained that the new transfer puts Jerry Seinfeld ’s show in a different aspect ratio: from an older square format to widescreen … yada-yada … now the picture crops out some sight gags and just seems slightly bizarro . Motion impossible: fallout It’s not the first time modern technology has caused problems. HD TVs can make even visually stunning films look like cheap soap operas, through motion smoothing – a process to reduce blurring (good for on-screen sport). But Tom Cruise was there to save the day: in a slightly awkward 2018 video , he explained how to adjust TV settings to undo this flat fiasco. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mr722c
Post a Comment
Read more