The devil not only has the best tunes, he sometimes has the best lines as well. In David Lan's production of Marlowe's tragedy, it is Richard McCabe's watchful, melancholic Mephistophilis who dominates the action, rather than Jude Law's conventional, vocally strained Faustus.
Lan clearly sees the work as a mix of morality play and psychological study, with Mephistophilis, Lucifer's agent, emerging as the most complex character. First appearing in a friar's habit, McCabe endows him with the commanding stillness and fixed gaze of someone who has a clear objective: "What will I not do," he says of Faustus, "to obtain his soul?"
But McCabe also invests this devilish go-between with the resonant sadness of someone who has looked on the face of God and is now cast into outer darkness. It is his ability to convey the sense of lost glory that makes this a mesmerising performance.
Law, by comparison, offers a more predictable reading of Faustus. With his gaunt, grizzled features and wayward hair, he certainly looks the part.
And he brings out a key quality of Faustus: his constant urge to repent, even in the midst of the satisfaction of his appetite. By gazing fixedly on a mirror in which he sees a reflected shadow of Trojan Helen, he also highlights Faustus's deluded narcissism.
But Law lacks the trained classical voice to match the part's great rhetorical flights, and when it comes to the prospect of eternal damnation he has little to offer except a hoarse rant.
The main virtue of Lan's production, apart from its elevation of Mephistophilis to tragic status, is that it manages to unify Marlowe's notoriously broken-backed play. It does so partly by using just seven actors to play multiple roles.
It also gives life to the central scenes of coarse slapstick by suggesting they are the reverse side of the coin from medieval piety.
"Divinity adieu," says Faustus, booting a Bible into the pit that surrounds Richard Hudson's raised, traverse stage. The episode in which the Pope is tricked of his lunch and gets a custard pie in his face suggests the kind of blasphemy that can only coexist with belief.
Even the low-comedy scenes, in which Tom Smith's red-nosed Robin dabbles in devilry, emerge as a caustic reflection of Faustus's higher magic and demonstrate the futility of his quest for omnipotence.
Lan's production is all of a piece in its adoption of the medieval moral framework. All it lacks is a Faustus with a genuinely overreaching spirit and a sense of the tragic nature of hellish damnation.
· Until April 27. Box office: 020-7928 6363.
