The production looks superb and the costumes took us from an earthly Tudor life to a bloody Roman underworld with giant deathly skeletal dragons and great feathered wings.

Paul Hilton was excellent as the young scholar Faustus, entranced by the power black magic will bring him, and enthusiastically seizing the opportunity to sell his soul in return for 24 years enjoying the powers Mephistopheles shares with him.

Doctor Who star Arthur Darvill plays an ambiguous, apathetic Mephistopheles. Felix Scott as Wagner was particularly good and brought an enjoyable energy to the stage. As the clown, Pearce Quigley turned a role which could have been an annoying comic turn into an unexpectedly endearing character.

As a viewer unfamiliar with the play, I thought the script and plotting didn’t seem to live up to the big issues the play explored. It never gets very scary but is frequently quite funny so the production never drags.

Watching an Elizabethan play under the stars at the Globe is always a magical experience and Doctor Faustus is a fascinating and imaginative evening’s entertainment.

18 June – 2 October 2011. Tickets from £5. www.shakespearesglobe.com

In other cast news, Joanna Riding’s been announced for new musical Lend Me A Tenor at the Gielgud Theatre. She’s currently at the same venue in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I wonder if she can keep the same dressing room?!

There’s more news for musicals fans (hurrah!):

• A stage adaptation of Top Hat starring Tom Chambers and Summer Strallen (in the roles made famous by tap-dancing king and queen Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) is coming to the West End in spring 2012, following a UK tour.
• Road Show, the latest musical by Stephen Sondheim, will get a UK premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory this summer, with a cast led by David Bedella.
• Musical comedy Betwixt! comes to the Trafalgar Studios from July, bringing a bizarre mix of music, writer’s block, disembodied heads, sex-crazed nymphs and hunchbacks to the venue.

On a more serious note, there’ll be yet another King Lear in the capital next year. This time, the venue’s the Almeida Theatre, Michael Attenborough’s directing and Jonathan Pryce is the ageing monarch.

Finally, the transformed Cottesloe theatre is hosting four new plays by four playwrights new to the National this summer:

• Sam Holcroft’s Edgar And Annabel features a young married couple in a world of freedom fighters and a police state in crisis
• The Swan by DC Moore follows a family preparing for a wake in a South London pub
• Prasanna Puwanarajah’s Nightwatchman challenges ideas of politics, sport and national pride through the story of a female cricketer preparing to make her England debut
• Tom Basden’s black comedy There Is A War is set in a land ravaged by an ever-raging civil war

The plays will be performed as two double bills from 8 July until 30 August.