Faust.

Here's the translation of the blurb for a forthcoming production of Doctor Faustus at a theatre festival in Santos. I quite like it.

If Faust still reflects our servile condition before power, it is perhaps because it represents a continuation of the way that social conditions have always been in the West. In the moment when society as we understand it was formed, various powers imposed man’s limits upon him. This conditioned existence subject to another still remains in force, whether through the religious structures of the past or the capitalist structures of the present. The metaphorical import of the play is no longer the search for modernity but the collapse of desire. There is no longer any value in desiring something, since desire is a byproduct of what is permitted by dominant systems. Just as reactions are also controlled permissions, so man's only option is to conform to unreal desire. It does not matter what it is and who it is for. Desire really does not matter. Mephistopheles is transmuted from the genius promising fulfilment to a futile force unable to survive by itself.