Literary lap dance

Great excitement for play-goers as a rare version of a theological masterpiece arrives in the West End. Doctor Faustus stars Kit Harington, a handsome, bearded bantamweight with round glasses and rock-star curls. We first meet him wearing a grey hoodie and lounging in a bedsit surrounded by cheap Catholic statuary. The druggy clothes and the religious iconography suggest a criminal Jesus-freak, possibly of Mexican origin, hiding out from cocaine dealers. Marlowe’s creation is somewhat different. Dr Faustus is a medieval potentate, a scholar of genius, a rich and celebrated German polymath admired by emperors and cardinals, who decides to exchange his earthly ambitions for the chance to wield supernatural powers for 24 years. But hell awaits him when the contract expires.

It’s an amazing story told by a playwright reaching a pitch of rhetorical magnificence attained by no other English dramatist, bar Shakespeare, and to stick the whole shebang in a crummy old flat suggests either wilful vandalism or culpable lethargy. The show’s creators, Jamie Lloyd and Colin Teevan, seem not to understand the play at all, still less to trust audiences to understand it. Faustus’s squat is populated by semi-naked actors leering out from the shadowy alcoves. One is a skinhead in a negligee. Another wears a string vest. A woman with an exposed teat glares at us with sulky accusation. Mephistopheles appears in an unwashed pinny. These figures represent demons and fallen angels on a temporary visit to the mortal world but they all sport unflattering nylon underwear, chewing-gum grey, drawn apparently from a catalogue of 1970s pants.