William Kentridge's fantastic puppets move at the Grec

You already know that the devil's great genius is to make you believe he doesn't exist. You also know that, whatever the soul, everyone has trafficked and traffics with it to achieve desire, comfort, pleasure, or power. Splendor Goethe's Faust is permanently relevant, and the very free version that William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company created in 1995, featuring a Faust traveling across the African continent, keeps the denunciation of human evil fresh in the international context of wars and genocides in which we live. The African Faust, like his European counterpart, is a dissatisfied wise man who wants to recover his youth and energy to win over his Margaritas. He makes a pact with the devil and travels through an Africa of satraps, shooting at everything that moves.

Faustus in Africa! It has something of a story for almost all audiences. A tale of villains with a simple dramatic skeleton, and I would say that with some subplots it doesn't fit well argumentatively. A tale that largely evokes and denounces the sad recent history of the African continent. A human, white, Mephistopheles, and a handful of stem puppets endowed with great expressiveness, brought to life—and that's exactly how it is—by six expert manipulators and agile direction that never lets interest wane for a moment.

It is a pleasure to savor the ingenious and intelligent encounter on stage of the expressive puppets, Kentrigde's cartoons, the musical phrases of the late James Philips, and a text traversed by the ironic words of the South African poet Lesego Rampolokeng, who in words is a brilliant glory, but it is only a reflection. You already know that.