Radio review: Doctor Faustus

The last time the RSC tackled Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the concept of the damned scholar and his demon servant as a two sides of the same coin was played with by having two actors alternate the roles of Faustus and Mephistopheles, with both actors and audience only finding out who would play whom at the start of the performance. Radio is a medium that allows for the idea to be taken easily to the next conclusion, so adaptor/director Emma Harding gives us hot Heff-on-Heff action: John Heffernan plays both roles in this recent Radio 3 broadcast. Faustus is a Wittenberg scholar frustrated by the limits of human knowledge found in the approved books; he expands his horizons to forbidden tomes on demonology, and manages to summon Mephistopheles. Despite the demon himself warning him against it, Faustus signs a contract to sell his soul to Lucifer in exchange for 24 years of Mephistopheles giving him any knowledge and power he desires.

Radio review: Great North Run

Just a few words about Tom Wells' likeable new contribution to Radio 4's stalwart Afternoon Play strand, Great North Run, which takes place in the buildup to the titular Newcastle half-marathon. It also takes place largely in the head of its narrator Will (Andrew Finnigan, who might have overtaken Andy Rush in the "regular Wells collaborator" stakes,) who tells the story in an imagined conversation with best friend Em (Amy Cameron.) Imagined because, as is often the case with these events, it's being run for charity in someone's memory - when she was ill with cancer, Em got Will to promise they'd run together in aid of Macmillan, and when she died, she left him instructions making it clear she expected him to stick to the plan (she also left him the tutu she expects him to wear.) Will's training coincides with his first year at university, in which he struggles to fit in, and provides a welcome nightly escape.