HEADLONG

There's a far more thrilling evocation of evil this week at Dundee Rep, where Headlong Theatre of Oxford are visiting with a radical new version of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, conceived and originally directed by London's latest theatre wünderkind, Rupert Goold. The approach adopted by Goold and his co-writer, Ben Power, is nothing if not bold. They take Marlowe's original story of a mediaeval German scholar tempted to sell his soul to the devil in return for a short lifetime of earthly dominion and sensual delight, and boldly intercut it with a fictionalised account of two real-life conceptual artists, the Chapman Brothers, who in 2003 decided to buy and deface a set of Goya prints showing the horrors of war.

There is, of course, something slightly laughable about the idea that the nearest modern equivalent to Mephistophelean evil lies in the world of BritArt and its controversies. But Goold and Power make a tremendously convincing job of their modern morality play, helped by a trio of terrific performances from Rocky Marshall and Tam Mutu as the brothers, and Claire Lams as a young Afghan film-maker who challenges their world-view. And if Michael Colgan's young Faustus suffers by comparison, the sheer, arrogant visual flair of the show is unforgettable, as it swerves with a twirl of moving walls between mediaeval Wittenberg and modern London, and draws parallels between Marlowe's iconoclastic genius and the spirit of modern conceptual BritArt that take the breath away, and chill the blood.