Making a deal with the devil is arguably a pretty weighty business. Contracts signed in blood, eternal damnation, all that. But unlike later retellings of the story by Goethe and Bulgakov, Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth century play 'Doctor Faustus' can't even come close to taking it all seriously. Paulette Randall's production is appropriately and thoroughly hilarious, centring on a female prankster Faustus who mainly uses her powers to play a series of ridiculous practical jokes.
The central gender switch works brilliantly: Jocelyn Jee Esien finds all the fun in this text, and is infectiously delighted with first her own cleverness, then her devil-begotten magic skills. Her decision to sign away her soul makes sense because it means that unlike Emilia (the frustrated heroine of Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's hit Globe show this summer), she achieves the ability to shift the patriarchal world around her. She's forever trying to get one up on this production's female Mephistopheles, played by a deliciously smug Pauline McLynn.
The world that surrounds this Faustus is jewel-bright and magical. Hell is a glimmering pit of candles, and the actors are resplendent in full historical dress. The masque scene representing the Seven Deadly Sins is reimagined with vogue ball-style flair, choreographed by Paradigmz, and Lucifer and his wife move with horrifying precision, like a couple from inside a haunted cuckoo clock.
Faustus's adventures across Europe and her conjuring shows for rich noblemen are full of magic and moments of sheer awe. Her punishment is much less satisfying than the crimes it follows. She's being condemned to almost unimaginably horrible eternal torments, to the land of pitchfork-wielding demons and eccentrically-limbed monsters you see in Hieronymous Bosch paintings - but its horror feels muted, somehow.
Still, that means there's one less thing to put a dampener on Faustus's party. And when you're watching her tormenting po-faced processions of monks, conjuring fruit from the air, or filling this tiny wooden theatre with fireworks, it's hard not to have a ball.