GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
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Faustus: That Damned Woman, Lyric Theatre Hammersmith
Ingenious reworking of Dr Faustus less than the sum of its parts
IN FOCUS THROUGHOUT: Jodie McNee as Johanna
[Manuel Harlan]
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
AS CHRIS BUSH points out in the programme note to her new play, there’s no surprise that the Faustus story — selling one’s soul to the devil in exchange for power – is one of the great myths of world culture. It’s operating every day, not least in contemporary politics.
Whereas power has been the traditional province of men, Bush’s Johanna Faustus is a woman determined at all and any cost to discover whether her mother, hanged as a child murderess witch, had in fact worked in league with the devil.
The only way is to go to the fountainhead and purchase infinite knowledge from a Lucifer tellingly bearing her father’s face.
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