Doctor Faustus/ A Yorkshire Tragedy, Stratford Circus, London/ White Bear, London

A devilishly good take on Marlowe

Theatrical wisdom rightly maintains that the most important feature of a set is the floor. It's what the actor stands firm – or infirm – upon. It literally underlies the performances. And it can metaphorically underlie them, too, when a production is as penetrating and imaginative as this version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, directed by Joss Bennathan for his company Present Moment.

The venue is the new-ish Stratford Circus where the stage is big. This fact, plus the roving nature of the story, which sees Faustus using his pact with the devil to gain a globetrotting 24-year lease of mountingly trivial life, could have resulted in a diffuseness of effect. Bennathan makes a thematic virtue of logistical necessity by using a multiplicity of square tables to create an eye-drawing inner-stage. Dispersed in various configurations around the cavernous space, these tables become the desks in a library where Faustus and other scholars swot, or the tables in a restaurant where the brainy eponymous over-reacher and the diabolical Mephistopheles chew the theological fat. There's also a wonderful moment when ecclesiastic flunkeys have to create a makeshift and rather precarious walkway for the arrival of the deeply corrupt Pope.

The extraordinarily characterful cast (a veritable Spotlight of intriguing, lived-in faces) are all young men in suits. This gives the production a curious energy as well as stylistic consistency and doubtless helps pitch the play right to the youthful audiences at which the production is aimed, though it would enlighten and gratify a seasoned Faust aficionado. Present Moment, in its outreach to the young, has also here hired 10 acting interns to work alongside the professionals. The "join" is largely indetectible. From the substratum chorus of suits, vividly idiosyncratic performances emerge. It doesn't feel remotely PC to have a young black Faustus in the excellent Babou Ceesay. He conveys the hero's intellectual dilemmas and footling fancies with an infectious directness. This Faustus is less snooty and more an Everyman than most. It's typical of the production's spry black wit that Simon Rivers' brilliant Mephistopheles fetches up at first kitted out as the kind of dishy curate that would set female hearts aflutter in a Bing Crosby movie. Then you look at his eyes. Helped perhaps by contact lenses, they are scandalous, unscandalisable eyes that will you into scandal with their heavy, lingering, amused passive-aggression.

Another Renaissance play receives very adroit treatment at the White Bear at the moment where another young company, Tough Theatre, have mounted a highly persuasive production of A Yorkshire Tragedy, directed by Andy Brunskill. This piece was once thought to be by Shakespeare, but once you are informed of the latest scholarly opinion – that it is by the Bard's great Jacobean contemporary Thomas Middleton – it feels absolutely Middletonian in the sense it imparts that money is at the root of more than evil. The story it tells is one of "familicide". Drowning in debt, with his estate and sense of his own honour slipping through his treacherous fingers, a landed gent takes it out on his nearest and dearest. Rather than directly experience the shame of being a bad father, this debauched squire prefers to retreat into the insane fantasy that his wife is a whore and his progeny bastards.

His Byronic good looks aflame with drink, curdled self-disgust and latent sensitivity, the excellent Lachlan Nieboer draws you into this man's spiral of bad faith. Charlotte Powell is also very good as the wife who revives and eventually forgives him. Her reaction would be unthinkable these days, but Powell's quiet, affecting performance helps us to see that it is emotionally comprehensible. The past may be a foreign country where they do things differently – but one patronises it at one's peril.

Doctor Faustus: to 6 February (0844 357 2625); A Yorkshire Tragedy: to Sun (020 7793 9193)