DR FAUSTUS
A costume-led reinterpretation of Marlowe’s tragedy

Marlowe’s devils describe damnation not as a place but a condition, hell as wherever the damned happen to be standing, heaven’s absence rather than a location. That single idea is the engine of this project: a world built from smoke, shadow and unstable light, where the line between the living and the damned is atmosphere rather than geography.

The world. Staged as “smoke and mirrors” : fog, chiaroscuro, thunder-and-lightning entrances lifted straight from the stage directions. The production treats devils as figures who must announce themselves, larger than life, taking up space. Faustus himself belongs to a rigid world of academia: his costume and the library setting draw on the Bodleian Law Library’s Grade II-listed interior and Magdalen College’s old library, cold stone and ordered shelving standing in for the rational mind about to be undone.

The devils share one design brief ,each must be admired and feared in the same instant. Mephistopheles gets a visible transformation, following Marlowe’s own hint that he first appeared too monstrous for Faustus to bear and had to change form; here that reads as ornate, thorned, half-beautiful armour. Beelzebub grows from the play’s grim image of infant sacrifice, researched through portraiture of children and infants, rendered as something bone-white and swaddled, wrong. The good and evil angels are conceived as yin and yang made flesh, opposite, inseparable, draped in Renaissance folds after paintings at the National Gallery and Tate Britain, coloured in the black-and-white plumage of wild birds so they read as two halves of one ghost.

Lucifer is the project’s centre of gravity, a rebel angel, not yet a devil, caught mid-transformation rather than fully fallen. The doublet takes its exaggerated, pointed silhouette from historical menswear once read as a symbol of masculine dominance, resurfaced here in metal domes and cone studs so the fabric reads like reptile scale crossed with punk armour. Underneath, a harness rigs up wing-like structures, the last trace of angelic glory, worn as an under-layer rather than displayed outright, so they surface only in movement, trembling as he performs. The helmet completes the arc: feathers giving way to stud and horn, the crest silhouette borrowed from classic punk hair. Below the waist the costume turns into statement-making, hand-painted slogans, occult symbols, chain and safety-pin hardware, and Dr. Martens grounding him in a very English tradition of rebellion. He is, by design, someone who hasn’t decided yet what he is.

On screen, the devils’ arrivals are staged around the play’s own stage directions, thunder, lightning, smoke thick enough to feel possessed. Practical effects and sound design turn the raw costume footage into something closer to ritual than runway: Faustus’s world dissolving, scene by scene, into the devils’ fog.