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.

Directed by Caroline Byrne, the first half of the play is set in 17th-century plague-ridden London where, determined to use her newfound powers to do good, she instructs Mephistopheles, her somewhat effete  enforcer, to cure the city’s pestilence which he does by devastating fire. The devil works in mysterious ways.

Jodie McNee as Johanna holds the stage throughout as she travels through upcoming periods of history to accomplish, through scientific progress, her mission to improve the human condition, particularly its feminine element.

When even a not-too-distant silicon Utopia proves illusory, we are back to square one and payment day is upon her.

Yet, although the play is full of interesting ideas, these are never fully developed. An example is Danny Lee Wynter’s Mephistopheles who, amused by his charge’s lost cause, begins to admire her determined energy, a transformation that might have been pursued further.

Ana Ines Jabares-Pita’s set, a great dark ribbed shell of a cave, symbolically loses some of its ribs as women’s lot improves through the ages, owing largely to their own rather than satanic agencies, and Line Bech’s costume changes for the protagonist enhance a production which at present adds up to less than the sum of its parts.

Runs until February 22, box office: lyric.co.uk