THIS new version of Goethe's Faust by Edinburgh playwright John Clifford is a high-risk project in at least three ways. First, it takes a courageous playwright, backed by a brave director, to tackle Faust at all. Big, bold, unwieldy and often overwhelming, Goethe's tale of the bored and rebellious academic who sells his soul to the devil in return for a life of extreme human experience is an astonishing piece of fantasy-fiction, full of angels and demons, realism and mythology, and wild bursts of satirical comedy; it's also a mighty epic poem, as complex in language as in thought.

Second, Clifford and the Lyceum's director, Mark Thomson, have taken the bold decision to model their version closely on Goethe's original, rather than seeking to shorten it into one play or to simplify its radical structure. The second half, in particular, is allowed to develop in its own startling picaresque style, moving through multiple landscapes of myth and modernity.

Third, Clifford has decided to place up front his own intense personal response to the Faust story, transformed over the past two years by the death from cancer of his wife, the former Scotsman journalist Sue Innes, and by his own experience as a transsexual man who increasingly chooses to live as a woman.

The result is an intensely emotional and contemporary Faust, which nakedly uses personal experience and pain as paths of entry into the text. In Part I, for example, it takes very personally the idea of evil entering into a human life, bringing with it forces of decay and death. Dugald Bruce Lockhart's seductive Mephistopheles enters on a wave of glamour, promising Paul Brennen's bespectacled and slightly geeky Faust every kind of sensual fulfilment. In truth, almost every experience he provides, apart from the seduction of the beautiful and innocent Gretchen, is repulsive to a degree: vile nip-tuck cosmetic surgery performed by frolicking apes, or a restaurant that serves boiled babies' brains. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the whole production lies in its failure to evoke the superficial attractiveness of the modern face of hell, its bland daytime-television brightness. In Part I, the ugliness is too obvious and grotesque to challenge the audience, or to achieve the insidious quality of evil.

In the second part, Clifford uses his perspective on gender politics to reopen the question of what Goethe means when he says, in the final lines of Faust, that "the eternal feminine leads us upward". Here, the poet-figure of the first half reappears transformed into a woman, beautifully played by Isabella Jarrett, and Clifford lays a growing emphasis on the play's implicit critique of traditional male sexuality, with its destructive machismo not only towards women, but also towards nature itself, threatened by Faust in his final career as a creator of great public works.

The result is a diffuse and often unsettling theatrical experience, in which the dark-toned visual images sometimes seem strangely disconnected from the text. It's also intensely, explicitly and sometimes brutally sexual, in a way that is bound to upset some theatregoers. There's a lack of obvious star-quality among Thomson's company that leaves the actors with a huge amount of work to do in winning over the audience. But, for all that, they deliver Clifford's mindblowing 21st-century take on this great story with an idealism and intensity that becomes irresistible, and which can only grow richer and deeper as this remarkable production matures.

If Clifford gives us a Faust who is a little bit transsexual, Jerry Springer the Opera - which arrived in Glasgow this week amid a flurry of hymns protest from fundamentalist Christian groups - is famous for giving us a Jesus who is "a little bit gay". Like Faust, Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee's operatic send-up of The Jerry Springer Show deals with metaphysical themes of heaven and hell, death and redemption; it even features similar images of hermaphrodite angels, and a Lucifer in a red suit. Unlike Faust, though, it is also a complete ethical shambles, and a thoroughly confused piece of theatre.

It starts out coherently enough, as a satire on the crudely exploitative aspects of Springer's confessional TV show. But after the interval - when Jerry is shot, and descends to hell - the show collapses into a series of silly jokes at the expense of conventional Christianity, ends up apparently endorsing an amoral world-view - "energy is pure delight, nothing is wrong and nothing is right" - then has the cheek to end with a powerfully moralistic chorale about how we should look after one another.

Thomas's music is often superb, with some truly beautiful moments, and the singing, from Lee's 20-strong cast, is breathtaking. But, as the reactionary sniggering of the audience over subjects such as homosexuality and rape shows, this big-theatre version of Jerry Springer the Opera is hopelessly complicit with the media evils it sets out to satirise, and often hooked on the one-line joke of using an operatic idiom to sing out the f-word. The fact that the critical reputation of this mediocre show stands so high speaks volumes not only about the power of protest to lend importance to what would otherwise be insignificant, but also about a culture now so allergic to the idea of the sacred that any facile assault on religion can be mistaken for a work of art; even when it misses the most important targets by a long and dangerous mile.

Faust parts I and II are at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 8 April. Jerry Springer the Opera is at the King's Theatre, Glasgow, until 11 March; His Majesty's, Aberdeen, 14-18 March; and the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 24-29 April.

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