Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Faustus: That Damned Woman, Lyric Theatre Hammersmith
Ingenious reworking of Dr Faustus less than the sum of its parts
FUAT
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
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.
More from this author
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
GORDON PARSONS relishes a fast moving production of Sheridan’s comic masterpiece
GORDON PARSONS relishes a play that reveals how language carries much more than simple communication
