Erin Harrington reviews Faust on Trial, by Josiah Morgan, Jonty Coulson and Stella Cheersmith with Pedro Ilgenfritz, created as part of the Hagley Theatre School Six-Month Theatre Creation Course, at Te Wā, Thursday 6 November, 2025.
One of the most interesting and energizing things to happen in the performing arts in Ōtautahi recently has been the roll out of the new look Hagley Theatre School. Previously the long-running Hagley Theatre Company, the School relaunched in 2025 with a very different vision, a new artistic director (Dr Pedro Ilgenfritz), a new curriculum, a distinctly embodied pedagogical approach, and an enhanced focus on supporting creatives to develop new work. When the refreshed programme was unveiled back in 2024 there were murmurs from some corners about this distinct change in direction; there was a lot of love for the HTC. However, if the proof is in the pudding, then the new works that are being developed through the Hagley’s six-month Theatre Creation Course are evidence that this particular approach to creative training and incubation is really paying off. Earlier this year we had the solo satirical comedy The Meeting and the heartfelt, semi-autobiographical romantic drama E Ipo, My Love; see Lisa Allan’s review of these here. This week’s physical and subversive performance of Faust on Trial is something completely different, but no less rigorous and exploratory.
Drawing from Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan drama Doctor Faustus, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1790), it asks questions about power, politics and subjectivity, all with a mordant wit and an eye on present day politics. This production is staged at the new performance / arts / cultural / everything space Te Wā, in light industrial Sydenham – another exciting development – where we’re greeted by Stella Cheersmith, shining bright in classical garb as Helen of Troy. Te Wā’s upstairs lounge space looks out onto the city – bright, pastel tinted clouds rimmed in gold accompanying a hot as hell 28 degree nor’wester – and the walls are lined with workshopping materials and notes. We’re seated in a square around a large cage that dominates the space, in which Josiah Morgan (as Mephistopheles) and Jonty Coulson (as Faust) circle one another, lounge, and shift, all while a projection on the ceiling runs a timer noting how long they’ve been inside. There’s some bedding, a stack of books by Indigenous and decolonial writers, some wine and water, food, packed bags and (ominously) a chemical toilet.
Bea Gladding drolly reads stage directions and scene changes from the sidelines, framing the action and in some cases prodding at the performers when they’ve not followed their own instructions. In the source texts, with several variations on narrative details, Faust, a scholar hungry for power and knowledge, and the demon Mephistopheles make a pact. Mephistopheles will serve Faust for a set period, and at the end of the term Faust’s soul will be forfeit to the Devil and he will be enslaved in hell. The schtick here, we learn, is that Faust is (still) in hell. We are here to see a trial, adjudicated by Helen, in which Faust will try to renegotiate his deal with the devil; after all, times have changed, haven’t they? Shouldn’t deals change too? After man and demon have stated their case, we’ll vote on who gets freed – that is, which actor gets to go home, and who is trapped inside the cage until the next performance.
The hour-long show is funny, clever, prickly. It combines verse and prose, and riffs on a wide range of literary and popular sources (as Homer meets The Bachelorette). It also nods to various traditions, from classical and Elizabethan theatre, to Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Indigenous modes of political performance. Morgan and Coulson offer committed and very physical performances – sometimes so physical my companion and I worry they’re going to accidentally hurt themselves, as they climb around the cage’s detritus – pleading and berating, trying to bend the audience to their perspective as the sun goes down.
Morgan is slippery, charismatic, deft, his Mephisto a right little shit. Coulson’s Faust is just as objectionable – pompous and persuasive, making a case for knowledge and fallibility, even while his own ego undermines his apparently lofty intentions. The audience is brought into their cases, physically, sometimes verbally; we’re always implicated, well before we’re asked to cast our vote.
I love Cheersmith’s take on Helen, who appears in both earlier versions of the play, but for Goethe as the objectified embodiment of a classical feminine ideal. She’s powerful and provocative, also frequently exasperated, stalking round the space, addressing the audience, waving cards like the score girl at an MMA fight, and laying out the rules of a rigged game. The framing if the show is that Faust is white, with white problems, and white solutions; Helen prods the audience to think of all the perspectives missing, or subsumed, in these original texts – which also stand in for a wider set of artistic and political traditions. The four performers have terrific chemistry, and have clearly built a strong collaborative relationship.
The play is deeply engaged with questions about power and connection – what we are subject to, what we submit to, who or what we summon, the imbalanced bonds and inescapable but contestable dynamics of everyday life. I mean, the cage is right there. There’s a lot going on about text; I appreciate that the struts of the cage are papered with pages from the source texts, framing (trapping?) everything, while the floor is papered with the work’s production script, trapping (framing?) the actors in a work literally of their own devising. Copies of Marlowe’s play sit at the corners of the cage, like artefacts marking out a summoning spell that’s conjured up the actors. Does the script summon the performance? The director, the actors? Is the play summoned, like magic, by the audience, or vice versa? The demon by the man, or the other way round? And what are the things that Helen (still an ideal) is subject to? The programme reminds us of the piss poor median salary of artists in Aotearoa; when we ask performers (like gladiators) to entertain us, what are the dynamics there? Who owes who what – what’s the pact?
These questions inform the play’s overtly political bent, as it touches in various ways upon patriarchal domination, climate change, genocide, colonisation, in the abstract (seas rise) and in the specific (as with Gaza). The play is clearly engaging with a long tradition of didactic political theatre, but to be honest I find more abstract and oblique engagements with the ideas more impactful and persuasive than name checks or direct address. My favourite moment of the show comes as Coulson points to audience members who must announce ‘power is!’ before he rattles off an almost manic litany of everyday actions. It’s an impressive piece of performance married to a thoughtful set of dramaturgical choices. Foucault would be proud. I won’t say who we collectively vote to stay stuck in the cage at the end with their tepid red wine and their sad looking sandwich, but it’s close, and really, both deserve it.
This is such a sparky and bold show – one with good humour and sound underpinnings, but also one that really embraces risk. There’s a lot of terrific performance work presented in this city, but only a little that really makes you go hang on, that’s interesting. My friend and I both come away feeling invigorated by this commitment to the development of new work, inspired to go away and make more stuff, and that’s utterly refreshing.
Faust on Trial plays at Te Wā until Saturday 8 November, 2025.
Flat City Field Notes 