HEADLONG

This is a wild, mad, deeply intelligent and thought-provoking show. In Rupert Goold and Ben Power's adaptation, Faustus (Scott Handy) sells his soul simply for power: a form of self-admiring nihilism. What else is the point of his antics with the Pope? These scenes alternate with a story about the Chapman brothers, the Brit Art pair notorious for defacing prints by Goya. Because, Goold and Power suggest, they are overreachers, like Faustus. Such artists are like the devils who destroy Faustus: they reject meaning, value and beauty. Faustus goes to hell; and Hell is the title of the Chapmans' famous installation about Nazism, destroyed in the Montmarte warehouse fire two years ago. Was that an act of God?

Either way, see this play. It'll make you think.

Rupert Goold's Headlong Theatre now follows a rare revival of Edward Bond's Restoration with this revival of Goold's 2004 Northampton production of his and Ben Power's treatment of Christopher Marlowe's best-known play. It divided critical opinion then and no doubt will now, but I love it.

The main strand of Marlowe's play has been intertwined with a series of scenes concerning Brit-art provocateurs Jake and Dinos Chapman's 2003 "rectification" of Francisco Goya's etchings Disasters Of War by adding clowns' and puppies' heads to the figures. As the Chapmans to Goya, so Goold and Power to Marlowe: the lines and power of the original can be seen along with the cheeky contemporary additions.

As Faustus (Scott Handy) is led astray by Mephistopheles (Jake Maskall), so the Chapmans (Stephen Noonan as Jake and Jonjo O'Neill as Dinos) alternate as each other's tempter. Goold and Power make clear the parallel that each narrative involves a conscious decision to blaspheme: in the literal sense when Faustus signs his soul away to Lucifer, and against a modern artistic "theology" when the Chapmans issue their conceptual challenge.

The motif of Hell crosses boundaries, too, as Mephistopheles' infernal realm is compared with the Chapmans' 2001 installation entitled Hell (which, we are reminded, was itself destroyed by fire in 2004).

It's all dazzlingly clever in the best sense of the word. Every time an over-emphatic note is struck, such as an Afghan camerawoman telling Jake the too-sententious story of the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, another chime of beautiful audacity sounds, as when a figure of the Pope felled by a meteorite in Maurizio Catalan's sculpture La Nona Ora gets to his feet to become the Pope who is mocked by an invisible Faustus. Mark Lockyer turns in a wicked parody of art pundit Matthew Collings, into the bargain. The final irony is that the Hampstead Theatre has a foyer exhibition of other Chapman "rectifications" of Goya, which are revealed as banal and trivial.

This play, though, is anything but: far from being navel-gazing conceptual art, it told me more about our individual response to the enormity of war than the entire evening of plays and discussion about Darfur that I had seen 24 hours earlier.