BLACKWELL’S Bookshop is to host a play for the first time when Creation Theatre takes over part of the world famous store next month.

The company will stage a production of Doctor Faustus in the Broad Street shop’s basement Norrington Room.

Next month it will come to life with the classic tale of a scholar who offered the Devil his soul in exchange for power.

Thousands are expected to flock to the shop to watch Christopher Marlowe’s story among more than three miles of bookshelves. Designers have created a stage in the philosophy department inspired by occult drawings from the Elizabethan period.

There will be 170 seats and standing tickets will also be on sale.

Blackwell’s events manager Zool Verjee said: “It’s going to be fantastic. This week they have put up the stage and started rehearsals, and it looks like it will be a fantastic production.

“There is a lot of excitement among our staff and customers. Creation are a really impressive theatre company and we thought it would be really good to work with them.

“We are a community bookshop and it’s important for us to be involved in something that’s community based and also something that’s really important culturally.”

Creation’s marketing and sales manager Cheryl Pearce said: “Doctor Faustus is an ideal play to set within a room housing hundreds of shelves of the world’s books as it is Doctor Faustus’s overwhelming desire for knowledge, and the power he expects it to bring him, that leads him to conjure up the demon Mephistopheles and ultimately to sell his soul to the Devil.”

Director Charlotte Conquest said the 42-night production would be one of the company’s most intimate and unusual venues in its 15-year history.

It has staged productions in venues such as Headington Hill Park, the Cowley Mini plant and Oxford Castle.

The show runs from February 4 to March 26. For tickets, costing £8 to £28, call 01865 766266 or 01865 333623.