A Superbly Accessible Introduction

The text that codified the old legend of the learned man who sells his soul to the devil, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one of the most influential plays in English history. It’s also one of the worst, from the point of view of the director.

Scenes of intense religious struggle are intercut with the crudest of groundling comedy skits, in the most incongruous of juxtapositions. It may be Marlowe’s way of emphasizing that, under his silks, Faustus is as ineffectual and decayed as the world he inhabits, but it doesn’t do much for narrative flow. And that’s before you get to the serious problems with the pacing of the play’s theological climax, or the 16th Century political lampoons of characters that flit in and out of the action before we’ve even had time to identify them.

But all this is why Matthew Dunster’s imaginative