Doctor Faustus, The Young Vic, London

With a little more contrast, Law could be devilishly good

Jude Law must be the best-looking actor to play Doctor Faustus since Richard Burton took on the role of this intellectual overreacher who makes a disastrous pact with the Devil in the famous Sixties production with his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, in tow as Helen of Troy.

In a feature for this paper last week, I jested of Law's Faustus that "the face that launched a million hormones will now get to utter the famous line about Helen of Troy and 'the face that launched a thousand ships'." By a startling coincidence, David Lan's highly penetrating production of Christopher Marlowe's play at the Young Vic chooses to bring out this correspondence in beauty for purposes deeper than the merely satiric.

When Law as Faustus beseeches Richard McCabe's splendidly subversive Mephistopheles to conjure up Helen of Troy for him to embrace, what follows in this version is breathtaking in its originality and schematic aptness. The fallen spirit flips over an oval mirror so that its reflecting surface faces Faustus.

Bathed in a golden spotlight and deluded by his own image, Law crawls besottedly towards the looking-glass and folds it hungrily in his arms. The spectacle is at once ridiculous and deeply sad, a striking emblem of the workings of the proto-Calvinist consciousness: the kind of spiritual masturbation that invents its own torments.

Law, and indeed the production, are at their best in the scenes that usually come off worst in stagings of Doctor Faustus – those in which the hero, frittering away his 24 years of trigger-happy immunity on earth, degenerates into a prankster playboy. Wild-eyed and unbuttoned, Law is magnetic as this hollow, joylessly pleasure-seeking rake, with McCabe a kind of amused Satanic Jeeves to his Elizabethan precursor of Sebastian Flyte.

Law could develop more of a contrast between this stage of Faustus's development and the state of play at the start by being less of an intellectual roaring boy and more quietly inward in the opening scenes.

The production disarms by arousing complex feelings where they are least expected. The episode where Faustus shows off by producing out-of-season grapes for the pregnant Duchess of Anholt (an excellent Annette Badland) becomes a deeply affecting contrast between the life-supporting simplicity of her desires and the barren twistedness of the hero's. The ending arrestingly suggests that it all might still be otherwise. Here, his fate is suspended rather than hellish.

The chorus's pious final verdict on him is pronounced, nightmarishly, in advance of any death and all the cast reassemble as the studious monks they were at the start. When Mephistopheles rematerialises to hand Faustus the book of life's secrets, you feel that he may just possibly make better use of it this time round.

Lan's production is never less than good, sometimes very good, and, on more than one occasion, diabolically good.