Damned if he does, damned if he don't

Mark Ravenhill's first play made him one of the most talked-about young writers on the London stage. So what better way to duck the flack over `Shopping and Fucking' than to produce a nice, cosy adaptation of a classic text like Goethe's `Faust'? He wasn't even tempted. By Paul Taylor

The two debut plays that have caused the most stir in London of late are, by fairly common consent, Sarah Kane's Blasted, in which Bosnia invades a Leeds hotel room, bringing everything from male rape to cannibalism in its wake, and Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking, a morality tale and urban fairy story about the "E" generation for whom human relationships, if they're to be trusted, have to be reduced to transactions. In the course of this desolately witty glimpse of a world of disconnection and dysfunction, junk food and junk jobs, an abused 14-year-old rent boy angles for, and receives, the only kind of love he can understand in the lethal shape of a sharp kitchen utensil up the backside.

Now here's an intriguing coincidence. Confronted with the tricky business of producing a follow-up to such sensational mediagenic starts, both dramatists have helped to deflect the likely backlash by writing plays about today in the semi-protective guise of classic adaptations. First, there was Phaedra's Love, Kane's uncompromising make-over of Seneca's tragedy of incestuous passion and unrequited desire. Arranging a blackly comic collision between the mythic story and the values of the Nineties, Kane turned the heroine's stepson, Hippolytus, from a priggish Diana-worshipping militant virgin to an unwashed godless layabout who treated sex much as he treated the junk food he idly scoffed while watching TV and allowing anyone interested to give him a blowjob. This inversion cleverly accentuated Phaedra's tragic plight: it was no problem getting into her stepson's knickers but impossible to get through to his heart.

Mark Ravenhill, meanwhile, has been busy with an equivalently contemporary re-working of the Faust legend. The result - called tersely and, some punters might want to argue, misleadingly, Faust - opens tonight at the Lyric Hammersmith. I met the 30-year-old dramatist and literary manager of Paines Plough (where Kane is now writer-in-residence) just after he'd come back from a trip to Berlin. Shopping und Ficken, as it's known in Germany, had received a raved-over reading at the Deutsches Theater and three production offers. Balding, mild-mannered, friendly and camp, Ravenhill is a cosier figure than you'd anticipate, if you hadn't seen the joke in those publicity shots of him bare-torsoed, covered in clingfilm and waving phallic vegetables. On the other hand, the image he's been putting about of himself as a non-clubbing "fourth Bronte sister" perhaps needs taking with a pinch of salt. I overheard Stephen Daldry, artistic director of the Royal Court, remarking that he and Ravenhill had left a club at 3am in order to find the Sunday paper in which the playwright made that stay-at-home claim.

It's not as a "don't shoot me, I'm only the adaptor" insurance policy that he and Kane have followed debut plays with revisionary raidings of the myth kitty, Ravenhill contends. What it shows, rather, is the changing policies of the outfits (respectively the Actors Touring Company and the Gate Theatre) that commissioned these pieces. "It was so fashionable and sexy five years ago to find obscure European classics, but it's dawning on people that there aren't many more undiscovered masterpieces to be dragged out," says Ravenhill. Putting hot young dramatists with famous texts is the way these companies are edging forward into the new-writing boom. Besides, a Faust reinvention so radical that some traditionalists may want their money back is hardly the most efficient flack-averter.

Each age remakes Faust in its own image. In Marlowe, he's a darkly equivocal version of the renaissance over-reacher, who, signing over his soul to the devil in a bid to rival the deity in power and knowledge, winds up merely illustrating the bathos of sensual gratification. In Goethe, where he will be damned only if he hits on a moment of happiness he would like to last for eternity, Faust represents, for some, restlessly progressive humanitarianism, for others, a premonition of fascism, depending on how ironically the redemptive ending is taken. The link with fascism becomes explicit in Thomas Mann's great novel, where a decadent composer's pact with the devil is paralleled by Germany's pact with Nazism.

Recent adaptors have retained the basic plot elements, whether using Faust for an attack on the soullessness of post-modern writing (as in Alan Judd's novel The Devil's Own Work) or on the abuses of scientific authority in a totalitarian state (as in Vaclav Havel's play Temptation). Ravenhill, by contrast, will have no truck with pacts or with clear distinctions between Mephistophelean tempter and tempted. For him, the fundamental question arising from the older versions is "What if man is as powerful as God?". What happens to that question, his play wonders, if you transpose the myth to a godless world where fashionable "thinkers" are even arguing that man, as an idea, is dead?

Retaining only the broad structure of "the journey of a thinker who stops thinking and goes out and lives", in the company of a sidekick, Ravenhill's 1997 Faust unwinds in the motels and desert spaces of the West Coast of America. Acting as video-chorus, Los Angeles teenagers relay the dehumanised values of a society where, when berated by his mother for stealing a VCR rather than food during a riot, a youth can reply, without irony, "Mom, what is the point of food in the house when you have nothing to watch while you are eating it?" The sidekick here is a nervy net-surfing geek whose father, not a million miles from Bill Gates, is like a travesty of the deity in the sense of reaching everywhere, software-wise.

Though there are touches of Foucault in the grimly pragmatic homosexual hedonism of the protagonist, Ravenhill's main model for the philosopher is Baudrillard, the man who drove across America and declared, with characteristic perversity, that the country was a metaphor of Disneyland rather than vice-versa. In the "hyperreal" US, he wrote, Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to disguise the fact that the rest of America is simulated.

Several of the back-to-front notions floated by Ravenhill's thinker - that, nowadays, events are merely shadows cast by predictive media analysis - are taken directly from Baudrillard, whose taste for anti-humanist paradox has resulted in books like The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Soul-destroying corruption of the intellect would be hard to resist in the amoral disembodied world Ravenhill's play conjures up, where, in order to feel real, men mutilate themselves and display their validating scars on the home-page of the Web. His Faust ends, though, with a chastening and bloody reminder to the hero that not all events are virtual.

Ravenhill, surprisingly, has never been to the US, but one of the reasons he wrote Shopping and Fucking, he says, was his belief that the "strangely vacuous" tone of writers like Brett Easton Ellis captures something about the lives and sensibilities of British twentysomethings. The video-choruses in Faust were done as a project with an American drama programme in London. The students, apparently, were quick to recognise and authenticate the "odd kind of detachment" he tried to get into the speeches. "Basically," said one student, "you're talking about the kind of person who can stand in the middle of an earthquake and go like `Woah, neat earthquake'." So accurately did this reflect his intention that the example was snapped up and now features in one of the choruses.

Ravenhill tells me that he sat with some young audiences who, frighteningly enough, have reacted to Shopping and Fucking as though the whole play, even the moving conclusion, were being offered in a spirit of disengaged irony. Perhaps that's what damnation in his version of Faust amounts to: imprisonment in an unfeeling post-modern pseudo-sophistication Mark Ravenhill's `Faust' opens tonight at the Lyric Hammersmith and runs to 15 March (0181-741 2311)