Theatre - Katherine Duncan-Jones on a starry but flawed performance of Marlowe's Faustus

From the 1930s until the 1970s, it was customary to view Marlowe's Faustus as a radical intellectual who dared to challenge orthodox beliefs and the authority of the state. Yet details of the text, especially the earlier "A" version on which David Lan's production at the Young Vic is based, do not support such a reading. The Wittenberg doctor seems both arrogant and childish. His opening boast that he has mastered all legitimate fields of human learning reflects his low boredom threshold, something we shall see more of in the course of the play. He has never bothered to read far enough in divinity to master the concepts of grace and forgiveness, and continues to agonise right up to the play's final seconds about whether he has, or has not, placed himself beyond the reach of redemption. It is not clear whether Marlowe the Cambridge drop-out was satirising the pretensions of all academics, or specifically those of German scholars. Or was he simply gratifying the downmarket and perhaps youthful audience who saw it at the Bel Savage Inn on Ludgate Hill, in 1588, with comical examples of the folly of the supposedly learned?

Certainly, there is much in Marlowe's play that is puerile, and this is to the fore in the Young Vic production. Jude Law's unusually young and handsome Faustus seems emotionally arrested. In the excellent opening scene, he tosses rejected bundles of books off the wide plank of the stage like a spoilt baby tossing toys out of its cot. Although his older colleagues Valdes and Cornelius have egged him on to necromancy, they are far too prudent to take it up themselves; and from the moment Mephistophilis enters, we can be sure that Faustus is a sucker. The masterful stillness of Richard McCabe's witty, flickeringly tragic performance provides the perfect counterpart to Law's self-obsessed writhings. The staging of the astronomy lesson in which first Faustus, then Mephistophilis, chalk up mathematical formulae on opposite walls shows the doctor as completely outclassed intellectually, but too dim to know it. And lest we are tempted to be just a tiny bit impressed by Faustus's success in conjuring up spirits, the equal success of his opportunistic servant Wagner (Bohdan Poraj) checks us. Not only can Wagner, too, summon up devils, but he is far more efficient than Faustus in recruiting a servant, the irrepressible Robin (Tom Smith). Although Faustus believes that Mephistophilis is wholly at his command for the agreed span of 24 years, McCabe leaves us in no doubt that the relationship is in truth the other way round.

Marlowe's play is concerned almost exclusively with relationships of power and submission, rather than with partnerships. Perhaps this appealed to the bonded apprentices who saw it at the Bel Savage, because every apprentice by definition dreamt of becoming a master. The scenes of knockabout farce, such as that of the Vatican banquet, explore literally vertical relationships. A Pope Joan figure (Annette Badland) clambers to the high top of a rickety throne of tables and chairs in order to spurn the unfortunate antipope Bruno (David Fielder). The Young Vic's staging is inventive and varied - it has to be, on such a constricting strip of stage, with its awkward sight lines.

Occasionally, the use of broad, pantomimic effects descends to church-hall amateurishness. It is also jerky in pace, more so than the play's admittedly episodic structure requires, and can move too slowly. Yet one scene struck me as quite brilliant: Faustus's erotic encounter with Helen of Troy, here shown simply as a golden light reflected in a mirror with which/whom he unites in an ecstasy of suicidal narcissism. Another scene, however, struck me as disastrous, and unfortunately it is the last one. Jude Law's frenetic delivery of Faustus's closing soliloquy "against the clock" is too shrill to be either poetic or affecting. And why, when his time is up, does Faustus remain on stage, rather than being pulled down into the ashy midden below, which so clearly represents hell? Is Law too big a star to be thus humiliated? Yet it is McCabe as Mephistophilis, appropriately enough, who comes across as the greater star.

Doctor Faustus is at the Young Vic, London SE1 (020 7928 6363), until 4 May

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