The Devil in the Machine: The Doctor Travels through Time in Chris Bush’s Faustus: That Damned Woman

Chris Bush’s Faustus: That Damned Woman (first performed in 2020) is a feminist and contemporary adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The magus is a woman who travels through time from the seventeenth century to the far distant future. In the process, Johanna Faustus becomes a brilliant scientist who attempts to create digital immortality by uploading the minds of billions of human beings to the Cloud. When a power failure destroys almost all of humanity, it is uncertain whether the universal outage is caused by Mephistopheles (in accordance with the expectations of Faustian fantasy) or is simply an unforeseen but predictable accident (in accordance with the expectations of technophobic versions of science fiction). I argue that Bush’s play traces the chronological and generic arc from magic/fantasy to science/science fiction, blending the two so that the age-old monster, the Devil, enabled by Faustian arrogance, is reimagined as an avatar for an unreliable technology that destroys what it is designed to preserve.