Theatre: Faustus: That Damned Woman
Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 until 22 February, then touring (headlong.co.uk) Running time: 2hrs 20mins
Faustus selling his soul to the Devil is the ultimate story of “agency” constrained, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. And given the lack of female agency through the centuries, it’s a tale that would seem ripe for a feminist reworking. Yet attempts to rework the Faust myth with a female protagonist have been strangely few and far between. Is there somehow an assumption that exchanging your soul for mortal advantage is not something a woman would do? All credit then to Chris Bush for her “impressive” new play,
Faustus: That Damned Woman, which has kicked off a national tour at the Lyric Hammersmith. It “feels like a watershed”. Bush’s writing “abounds with flair and rhythm”, and “borrows smartly” from Marlowe. And in Jodie McNee’s “incandescent” performance as Johanna Faustus, every word “strikes sparks” amid the “suffocating gloom”.
I wouldn’t disagree with the suffocating gloom bit, said Clive Davis in The Times. But sparks? I think not. On paper, the idea of transforming Faust into an impoverished young 17th century woman whose mother has been hanged as a witch is intriguing. So too the conceit of making an ability to time travel part of her Devil’s bargain. But the tale Bush builds upon this attractive premise is a “numbingly simple-minded” and predictable feminist tract, which forsakes the poetry in favour of a lecture. There is also something unintentionally comic in the way Johanna uses her time-travelling powers to “encounter Famous Women From the Future” (Marie Curie, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson). The play’s sound design and set “add some atmosphere. The rest is a mess.”
That’s too harsh, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. Yes, this is a bumpy ride at times. But it is held together by McNee’s “superb performance”, rippling with “fanatical charisma”, and by Danny Lee Wynter’s turn as Mephistopheles, whose camp malevolence “agreeably undercuts Johanna’s burgeoning” messiah complex. This Faustus ends up being an enjoyably “breezy epic”: it might be a touch silly at times, but it’s worth seeing.