There is, literally, a damned good reason why Don Giovanni is known as 'the director's graveyard'. Gifted directors are forever falling foul of a plot in which a guy who has gone to the bad goes to hell - scarcely the most suspense-filled dramatic premise ever penned. The runner-up in the inexorability stakes is Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus - which isn't far off being Don Giovanni without the love life. But if everyone can predict the outcome of the man-sells-his-soul-to-the-devil plot, how on earth do you charge up the proceedings? Cast Jude Law.
Not that David Lan has capitulated to the vogue for confusing theatre-going with astronomy - star-gazing as an art form. Law and Lan have worked on stage projects twice before, and in their latest production that working relationship pays handsome dramatic dividends. Law's focused Faustus cuts a commanding figure, strutting in jet-black doublet and hose down Richard Hudson's bald catwalk runway set.
Law is particularly strong on fiercely projected moments of arrogance and viciousness, but he is far less convincing with the character's decline. His anguish is clearly sincerely felt, but although his physical performance is impressively energetic, his acting grows dangerously generalised and slides into unilluminating self-pity.
In fact there's a self-consciousness underscoring the whole evening which starts well but gradually tips over into earnestness. Lan's six-strong cast work hard doubling-up as whores and angels, devils and scholars, but the effect is effortful: when the cast adopt masks to play the seven deadly sins, they don't make the theatrical leap into another dimension, you just watch them doing clever mask-acting.
You keep wishing the show would loosen up, but instead of being borne aloft by the flow of Marlowe's ideas and vivid language which should conjure envy, terror and visceral excitement, you merely witness the working out of the stripped-down production with its oddly diffuse musical score and inexpressive shift into modern dress.
True to form, Mephistophilis (Richard McCabe) grabs attention but the performance of the night is Bohdan Poraj as Faustus's sidekick, Wagner. His quiet, resonant performance is an expressive lesson in the power of calmly controlled relaxation.
