Not since Duke Ellington supplied the music to an Orson Welles production with Eartha Kitt as Helen can Marlowe's Doctor Faustus have received quite such a radical makeover. But, while this Rupert Goold and Ben Power Headlong Theatre adaptation is ingenious, it creates almost as many problems as it solves.
It intersperses the story of Marlowe's Renaissance overreacher with that of the contemporary Chapman brothers who chose to "rectify" a set of rare Goya etchings. Faustus's pact with Mephistopheles is paralleled by the brothers' financial bargain with a Lucifer-like, Barcelona art dealer.
But the connection between the necromantic doctor and the art-doctoring Chapmans won't quite wash. Faustus risks eternal damnation in his pursuit of power and pleasure: the Chapmans, in superimposing hand-painted cartoon heads on Goya's Disasters of War etchings, suffered the wrath of Brian Sewell, which is not quite the same thing. Even if the adaptation itself, at one point invoking the Taliban destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan, is implicitly critical of attention-seeking western artists, it can't get over one fact: while Faustus goes to hell, the Brit art gang have achieved international celebrity.
However, I enjoyed the vivacity of Goold's staging. Laura Hopkins' set swings easily between Faustus's fusty study and the chic, white cube purity of contemporary galleries. And while Scott Handy conveys the feverish restlessness of John Faustus, Stephen Noonan endows Jake Chapman with a contrasting icy certainty as he comes out with pronouncements such as "art is event and showbiz". Jonjo O'Neill as his quieter sibling, Sophie Hunter as an updated Trojan Helen and Jake Maskall as a tortured Mephistopheles lend weight to a production that is provocative without quite persuading me that artistic notoriety is the modern equivalent of purgatory.
· Until November 18. Box office: 020-7722 9301.